Robert Adley (1935–1993)

The author, who at the time he wrote this was a back-bench Member of Parliament, examines the fate of British Railways in the 1960s, as a consequence of the 1955 'Modernisation Plan' and the report by Dr. Richard Beeching 'The reshaping of British Railways' which advocated rationalising the network, based on a combination of economics and political direction. The 'Beeching Plan' closed many rural feeder railways, anticipating that passengers would travel further by car to new railhead stations; it did not anticipate that an improved road network would see people staying in their cars for the whole of their journeys. Add in a degree of over-imaginative misuse of statistics in compiling traffic figures, and a political landscape where the Minister of Transport was a road-building construction magnate with friends in the haulage industry and you have a situation which in other countries would be called naked corruption. That the railways survived at all is something of a miracle.

Adley combines the political perspective of an MP with a love of his subject that only an enthusiast can have. He gives a political history of railway policy of the 1960s and compares and contrasts the British experience with a similar situation in France where the SNCF adopted different solutions.

Written about one railway disaster - the cuts of the 1960s - before another - privatization - this book should have been more widely read; but politicians are renowned for never letting facts get in the way of policy.

The book is illustrated by many of Adley's own photographs. He was not a great photographer, and many of the pictures would benefit from modern digital retouching. But taken as a whole, this is an interesting package.… (mais)