Oh, Doctor Beeching!

By Paul Tritton

Recent postings on the KAS website (†) include 500 epitaphs on gravestones & memorial plaques in four Maidstone churches and burial grounds – All Saints’ Church; Maidstone Baptist Church, Brewer Street; Holy Trinity Church, and Union Street Methodist Church.

Among those remembered are ancestors of one of Britain’s most controversial captains of industry – Dr Richard Beeching. This account examines the impact on Kent’s transport history of the 1963 Beeching Report The Reshaping of British Railways, and is illustrated with photographs supplied by Dr Robert Cockcroft, KAS Hon. Assistant General Secretary, a keen railway enthusiast who has collected many photographs of railway buildings.

The ‘Beeching cuts’ were memorably lamented by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann in their song “We Won’t be Meeting Again on the Slow Train” (‘No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat‘), but Kent escaped lightly since most of its unprofitable routes had already closed.

Among these were the Elham Valley Railway from Canterbury to Folkestone, the Sheppey Light Railway from Leysdown to Queenborough, the Hythe &

Sandgate Railway, the Canterbury & Whitstable Railway and, two years before Beeching published his report, the Kent & East Sussex Railway and Southern Railways’ lines from Paddock Wood to Hawkhurst & from Dunton Green, near Sevenoaks, to Westerham.

All this meant that Kent’s post-war railway infrastructure was mostly intact in the Sixties, but when they realized Beeching was proposing to close thousands of miles of tracks and stations nationwide, passengers across the county became increasingly concerned about the future of their services.

As it turned out, only two areas of Kent were affected by Beeching’s recommendations.

In the west, the last trains on the 20-mile cross-country route from Tunbridge Wells through the middle of rural Sussex to East Grinstead and Three Bridges ran on 1 January 1967, 101 years after the service opened, but the section of the line from Tunbridge Wells Central to Tunbridge Wells West and Groombridge, on the county border, was reprieved, surviving until July 1985.

In 1997 the track between Tunbridge Wells West and Groombridge reopened as the Spa Valley Railway, now a favourite heritage line.

Above

Tunbridge Wells West in 1988, three years after closure and nine years before becoming the headquarters of the heritage Spa Valley Railway. ©Dr Robert Cockcroft. secretary@kentarchaeology.org newsletter@kentarchaeology.org.uk