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Looking Back: The Railway ‘Cuts’

From May 1963


The Railway ‘Cuts’

A piquant story for the descriptive pen of future historians!

Until now we have accepted the chugging of the trains on our Victorian and Edwardian railway systems (laid down in most cases before alternative road transport was available), assuming that ‘private enterprise’ railway companies would never curtail anything that seemed to be taken as part of the public good.

Now, under public ownership, we are suddenly and very reasonably confronted by the proposition that the railways must run for profit!

Plainly we must beware of merely emotional and angry reaction. Drastic revision had to come. There must be no wastage of money in what has become obsolete. But clearly also transport is an essential community service; and there is more to it than economics.

Last year’s Church and Nation report to the General Assembly said: “Profit should not be the only consideration in determining where and when trains run. The railways are also a public service which accepts the responsibility of providing a nation-wide coverage”.

If we did not take that view of the health Service then why not remove doctors from the more sparsely-populated areas and have weekly clinics served from main centres?  And in the Post Office – why have these telephone kiosks in remote glens and islands; and why have Post Offices which do not pay?

The logic of it would be, ‘Why are these people living in these remote areas at all – why not encourage them to come out of them by depriving them of the national services?

We do not take that line – yet. But the Beeching proposals, if adopted in their entirety for Scotland, might hasten it.

What is at stake is much more than the solvency of the railways. It is the community of the nation, and what is required in a co-ordinated transport policy for its essential life. Our total economy must be sound; but we must also make up our minds what kind of people our economy exists to support – whether we are to be a nation composed of living communities or a nation of technical robots serving an efficient economic machine; whether in fact the ‘system’ is made for man, or man for the ‘system’.


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