Comments by "" (@Bungle-UK) on "Lotuseaters Dot Com" channel.

  1. Everyone is a target….they want everyone to change to match their way of thinking. It’s not about equality, it’s about control.
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  2.  @salsa564  no, they want to be seen as something different to the reality of what they are.
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  3. Sorry to say the narrative here is mostly nonsense. Motorways are trunk roads for long distance travel. Beeching wanted to develop the railways into a trunk intercity system for similar journeys. It was mostly little used branch lines that were cut, many never even recouped their building costs let alone turned a profit. It was the culmination of a process that had begun decades before, and the majority of closures happened under the following Labour government, of which Marples wasn’t a member. Clearly some closes were a mistake, but it’s easy to look back with hindsight. The bulk, however, would still just be farting round fresh air if they had stayed open.
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  4. But it wasn’t ‘rapid transit’. Most of these lines carried just a handful of trains per day, with virtually no passengers.
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  5. Thanks for making this point, rather undermines the Marples conspiracy theory that gets trotted out. I believe Labour campaigned to save lines threatened with closure, then promptly closed the and more once in government.
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  6. Why does he keep saying every other country was laying more track at the time….that clearly isn’t true. Contraction of rail networks was going on all around the globe.
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  7. The majority of closures were under the following Labour government….they could have stopped it but didn’t. Are we blaming Marples for that too?
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  8. Exactly. Too many people have some notion that these lines were crammed with packed trains, which they clearly weren’t.
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  9.  @tommyhill7645  if you kept living in the past you would have stuck with canals and never had railways in the first place.
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  10. The big four were already closing lines before the Second World War. This was just the end of a process that had already begun, removing many lines that should never have been built in the first place.
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  11. Time moves on. Motorways took traffic from rail just as rail took traffic from canals and stagecoaches. No form of public transport will ever compete with the freedom of personal transport.
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  12.  @nickedwards2904  in which case the right time logistics that we have today wouldn’t exist. Rail works for bulk product movement but not for everyday logistics. The idea that a lorry would leave a supermarket warehouse, decant everything onto a train so that another lorry can pick it up at the other end to deliver to a store is fanciful. People need to allow the right mode of transport deliver jobs that they can do best….no mode can do it all.
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  13. Most of the network was carrying very few trains with even fewer passengers. People had already voted with their feet.
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  14. Exactly. Not sure why people think a branch line complete with expensive to maintain infrastructure, but carrying lots of fresh air, will benefit the overall network. Many lines had only a handful of trains per day, with few passengers, and were a huge drain on resources.
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  15. Exactly, a system built for the 19th century was hardly likely to be able to meet the needs of the 20th century and beyond without some changes.
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  16. Exactly. Marples may have set the ball rolling, and Beeching may have come up with a plan, but it was the Labour Party that swung the axe. They could have saved many lines but didn’t…..presumably because they knew it was the right thing to do.
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  17. The fact he keeps saying every other country was expanding their rail networks, when they clearly weren’t, shows how factually accurate he is. The contraction of rail networks was going on all around the globe.
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  18. Exactly, most were never viable from the day they opened. Clearly some closures weren’t justified with hindsight, but the vast majority were.
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  19. The cuts had begun at the turn of the century as the then private operators started to close lightly used lines. It’s far too simplistic to say every line ever built was useful.
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