| Biography | Richard Beeching, commonly known as Dr Beeching, was a physicist and engineer who for a short but very notable time was chairman of British Railways. He became a household name in Britain in the early 1960s for his report The Reshaping of British Railways, commonly referred to as The Beeching Report, which led to far-reaching changes in the railway network, popularly known as the Beeching Axe.
As a result of the report, just over 4,000 route miles were removed from the system on cost and efficiency grounds, leaving Britain with 13,721 miles of railway lines in 1966. A further 2,000 miles were lost by the end of the 1960s, while other lines were reduced to freight use only. |