Following this initial work on the collection, additional material was donated to the Archives Centre in February 2020.

A regular contributor to rail related TV programmes, he seems to have lost his objectivity and believes in a Marples/Beeching conspiracy to destroy the railways.Quite an interesting character, Mr Marples, from being a miner to a property tycoon on the run, not many people can say they’ve done that. Scoundrel Ernest Marples – the first CTC member to become minister of transport (he and his wife toured by bicycle) – officially opened the M1, Britain’s first city-to-city motorway, in November 1959. The BTC had been established by the Transport Act 1947, the same Act which created British Railways ( BR British Rail or British Railways) and the other nationalised transport services.

As noted above, this recommendation could bring about changes such as additional bus services but would not affect the closure itself. In later life, Marples was elevated to the peerage before fleeing to Monaco at very short notice to avoid prosecution for tax fraud. In anticipation of the 1962 Act, the government appointed Dr Richard Beeching as Chairman of the British Railways Board with a brief to recommend and implement such changes as were necessary to end the losses that were growing rapidly at the time. Their fine work redresses the imbalance in our history that has focused on Beeching alone for too long. Wasn’t the whole idea of the Beeching plan to try to make BR break even, something it never got close to doing even with all the loss making branches closed.

Administrators: If there are no problems with the current version, and it meets the non-free content criteria, please delete the previous version(s) under F5 on February 3, 2024 (seven days after January 27, 2024, when this template was added). Ernest Marples’ detractors are helped in their case by the virtual collapse of British car production between 1972 and 1980, when it was exposed to Common Market imports. The end of active service appears to have nurtured Marples’ interest and participation in local politics. Like it or not, car ownership boomed when Marples was Transport Secretary and buses were also posing a threat to the railways, as they were cheaper to run and able to serve more areas than a railway line.

He believes in some pre Beeching fantasy land, he overlooks that at the time people and freight were deserting the railways in favour of the Roads, because simply the Railway was not flexible enough. Ernest Marples is too consequential a figure for his career to be judged on his favouring of roads over railways and end of career tax avoidance. He claimed to invent the idea of flashing bulbs in orange plastic tubes and there were many hours late at night spent discussing patents. On balance, it seems that Marples was a “bit dodgy” in his business dealings and had enormous conflicts of interest as M.New housing was urgently needed to replace that destroyed by the Luftwaffe and replace temporary pre-fabricated dwellings. As the authors state, Beeching’s proposals continued a series of closures that started many years before his appointment: between 1950 and 1962, over 300 branch lines had already closed and 174,000 railway jobs had gone. At the same time the Labour Party at last got its act together and elected Harold Wilson as its new leader.