Beeching Report Cuts Would Mean Bigger B.R. Road Fleets
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BEECHING'S long-awaited plan for reviving Britain's ailing railways to be published next Wednesday. ailed "The Reshaping of British Railays ", it runs to 140 pages with maps id diagrams and is a highly technical )cument.
The fad -that it is to be published in
.11; without any Government editing, presents the first victory for Dr.
eechIng, For he has been determined At, however unpopular it may prove to : in parts to both Government and iblic, his document should appear just ; he wrote it.
That will leave to the Minister of ransport the task of making. clear which
arts of the plan are to be rejected by te Government, and why. It is likely to the end of May or early June before e is ready to do so.
The number of line closures likely to vetoed by Mr. Marples will probably !. much smaller than many people cpect, and once Dr. Beeching gets the a-ahead he is determined to push on full speed with the various aspects f the plan.
On the freight side, for example, there likely to be an early increase in the ailways' lorry fleet. With the closing own of several thousand small goods cpots and the concentration of freight andling on some 150 large centres, allection and delivery will have to be ver a much wider area.
On the passenger side, Dr. Beeching opes to bring the first closures into ffect in time for the winter timetables 1 October. The procedure of closures trough the Transport Users' Consulta ve Committees has been considerably !mainlined under last year's Act and rith a number of proposals already in le pipeline the first closures will not c long delayed. Since "social hardhip" is now the only ground on which he Committees can oppose the proposals, he existence of a good road and of an lternative bus service will be sufficient o squash any opposition.
Although details of the plan have not leen discussed with bus operators, rail
vay officials have been having talks with hem locally to see how far extra services an be introduced to meet demand from >assengers. Some of these may be run >y the railways themselves;
Ministers anxious to cushion the blow o fall on branch passenger services are auding the advantages of clean and easy ms travel—and are stressing that the fransport Act gives the railways power
o run these buses; the Minister of Trans
port has power to insist on them being provided.
Said one Government Minister, Mr. Niall Macpherson, last week-end: "The principle of a modern, economic railway service is beyond dispute; it need not and will not be applied blindly, indiscriminately or callously.
" In sparsely populated areas it is surely better to have one good service. be it bus or train, than two indifferent ones. If most people prefer to go by bus, then surely it should be a bus service rather than a train service."
Such action over rural rail services will surely force to the front once again the lack of Government action to aid declining rural buses.
Oil Prices Up ON Monday, Castrol announced that prices of its lubricating oils would rise by between Id. and 2d. a pint from April 1; Shell-Mex and B.P. announced on Tuesday that their oils had been raised in price by lcl. a pint.