Fifty years too late, but have we finally seen the folly of Beeching?

Five years ago this week, the Queen officially opened the restored Borders Railway, from edinburgh to Tweedbank – and on the same day she overhauled Queen victoria to become our longestreigning monarch.

Reporters, naturally, focused on that milestone and her gentle, self-deprecating remarks. But, half a decade on, the ‘Waverley Line’ is wholly cherished by the communities it serves.

Residents of Stow, for instance, no longer have to make a demanding daily drive to edinburgh and, as villager Grace Murray points out, not only feel much more connected to the rest of Scotland but much more bonded to each other.

‘i’ve made some incredible new friends who sit in the same seats every morning to have a laugh and blether before work,’ she says.

‘You don’t get that in a car. The railway has re-energised our community – that’s given a confidence to move forward and embrace a new future.’

Save perhaps by sea, it is hard to imagine any more pleasant, civilised way to travel than by train. You can enjoy a cup of tea, read the paper, peck away on your laptop. You can occasionally stretch your legs, or sit back and watch our countryside rolling by.

The advent of steam locomotion and the spreading of our rail network was central to industrial expansion and victorian prosperity. it drove the suburban spread of our great cities, made possible an efficient Royal Mail.

entire communities – Kyle of Lochalsh comes at once to mind – were created by railways. it is hard to see how Glasgow would function without the ‘Blue Train’, as we used to call it, and its neat intersection at Partick and elsewhere with the whooshing underground Subway.

BUT no sooner had the proud old companies been nationalised after the war than cold winds blew for decades against Britain’s rail and trains. The road lobby clamoured for motorways. Through the Fifties and into the Sixties – most notoriously, under Dr Beeching – stations everywhere were shuttered, entire lengths of track lifted.

Lovely, mossy old names simply vanished. As Flanders and Swann lamented, no more would we go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe, on the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road…

Routes the length of the land simply disappeared. Some, now – like the lines from Fort Augustus to Spean Bridge, or from Oban to Ballachulish – are all but forgotten. They had never been given a chance, as successful lobbying from rivals prevented direct links from Ballachulish to Fort William or Fort Augustus to inverness.

even lofty St Andrews lost its train connection, and edinburgh’s suburban railway ceased in 1962, though all the track is still there and restoring it would have been a far wiser use of public money than those wretched trams.

Margaret Thatcher had no time for trains. She thought them dirty, overcrowded and common, though even she drew the line at the 1982 Serpell Report, which would have torn up most railway in Scotland – most ludicrously, terminating the Oban and West Highland lines at Crianlarich.

Nor did Thatcher dare to privatise British Rail. in the rearview mirror, most now acknowledge that our privatised train network has been a success – even Lew Adams of the train drivers’ union Aslef, who opposed it at the time.

‘Today i cannot argue against the private entrepreneur coming into the rail industry,’ Adams said in 2004. ‘We are running 1,700 more trains per day since it was privatised. The entrepreneurs built traffic to the extent that we are having to build more infrastructure.

‘What is true is true: £4.2billion spent on new trains. We never saw that in all the years i’ve been in the rail industry.

‘Today there are more members in the trade union, more train drivers, and more trains running. The reality is that it worked, we’ve protected jobs, and we got more jobs.’

Today we enjoy the safest and fastest-growing railway in europe. We are reopening stations and branch lines as the French and others close and cut. We have improved and expanded the Cornish and Caledonian sleeper services: the Germans stopped all their sleeper services in 2016. The days of filthy stations, 50-year old carriages, curly sandwiches and surly staff are long gone.

Now Boris Johnson, no less, is eager fully to restore the Waverley Line as part of his ‘Build, Build, Build’ postBrexit endeavours.

Campaigners for years have clamoured for its extension all the way to Carlisle, reconnecting places like St Boswells, Hawick, Newcastleton and Longtown. After meeting Scotland Office minister iain Stewart in July, they reported enthusiasm and encouragement. A Borders Transport Corridors Study is under way.

THOUGH it attracted less attention than the Borders line, the Airdrie to Bathgate line – finally completed in 2011 – is hugely appreciated by the Central Belt folk it serves. it provides, for instance, a leisurely but direct run between edinburgh and Helensburgh, and links West Lothian communities with Glasgow.

St Andrews citizens, too, are pressing for restoration of their own train service, ended in 1969 – which left it as the only university town in Britain without a railway station. Today, it is choked with car traffic.

A 2012 study concluded a five-mile link with stops at Cupar, Dunfermline and edinburgh Airport would transform the quality of life and cost £75million – a fraction of the sum spent on the Borders route. Work is advanced on more Fife railway – the Levenmouth link, which will restore services to 33,000 people. Stations at Leven and Cameron Bridge will be revived, with the line expected to open in 2024.

Other communities increasingly press for reconnection – Lossiemouth, in the north, Haddington and Penicuik and Kilmacolm would love to see their stations return.

if the Beeching cuts continue to be reversed, though, there will need to be massive investment on infrastructure. The existing network already has some tight ‘choke’ points – the Queen Street station tunnels; the Forth Bridge – and there might also be more thought given to integration with the CalMac ferry network.

Fairlie would be a much more reliable port for Arran travellers than Ardrossan – Fairlie’s station survives, but its pier does not – and a spur off the Kyle line to Ullapool would delight the people of Lewis.

What is certain is the tide has turned. in the brash, plasticky Sixties, the zeitgeist was with the fashionable lass whizzing about in her Union Jack Mini. Rail was boring and would soon, as we covered the land in flyovers and underpasses, fade into history. Half a century on, it’s train travel that seems the height of civilisation.