Beeching 1963a, p.2, "It is, of course the responsibility of the British Railways Board so to shape and operate the railways as to make them pay".

In the early 19th century the Scottish engineers Thomas Telford and John McAdam made great advances in road construction, which cut travel time by days. Adopting techniques used by the Romans, Telford’s roads were raised at the centre so that water could easily drain away and were built out of layers of broken stones which became smaller with each coat. On the other hand, Hardy points out Beeching's political naïvete, and Fiennes notes that because a passenger service was producing a loss did not mean that it would continue to do so in the future. Like Fiennes and Hardy, Terry Gourvish's business history of British Rail sees Beeching as having a positive effect on railway management while not achieving perfection. [26] There is a broad consensus that the detail of figures used in individual cases were imperfect, but a wide divergence of view as to the significance of and motives for this. Ernest Marples was raised in Manchester by parents active in the Labour Party. In 1941 he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery and rose to the rank of Captain, before being medically discharged in 1944. The Transport Act 1962, which came into force in September of that year, dissolved the BTC and established five new public corporations to carry out the 'overseeing' role for each of the nationalised transport services. These included the British Railways Board (BRB) which was to oversee BR British Rail or British Railways. The Act also established new advisory bodies including the Central Transport Consultative Committee [note 1] with its Area Transport Users Consultative Committees (Area Committee or TUCC Transport Users Consultative Committee) to represent the interests of railway users at a national and local level. These committees could make recommendations relating to the services provided by relevant Board, but the Minister was not bound to follow their recommendations. [1]

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The Times, "Beeching Report Proposes Closing Nearly a Third of Britain's 7,000 Railway Stations", 28 March 1963, p. 8. The first report was accepted by the Conservative government of the day, which argued that many services could be provided more effectively by buses. [33] Most recommendations were subsequently taken forward by the Labour government elected in 1964, but many of the proposed closures sparked protests from communities that would lose their trains, a number of which (especially rural communities) had no other public transport. [34] Yet revisionists say Beeching is unfairly maligned. He did, after all, recommend that withdrawn rail services should be replaced by buses and warned of the upheaval to come. He noted that “changes of the magnitude of those proposed will inevitably give rise to many difficulties affecting railway staff, the travelling public, and industry”. Gourvish, T. R. (1986). British Railways 1948–73: A Business History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521188838.

The work fulfils a vital role. It fills an important vacancy on the shelves of those interested in post-war politics, ministerial biographies and life writing, and transformational processes in transport and industrial history. Furthermore, it restores the significance of a towering figure in post-war Conservative politics to their rightful place. 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. Frankly, he is too interesting for that. Where he came from, how he got to those positions of power, and what he achieved are far more significant." Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire

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Brandon and Upham’s fresh review shows all sides of a complex man who might well have been a politician before his time. They give the pros, the cons and enough evidence for readers to make up their own minds. Their fine work redresses the imbalance in our history that has focused on Beeching alone for too long. Rail Magazine - February 2022 Did Beeching, who died in suburban obscurity in 1985, deserve to become a bogeyman? He would have hated the easy scapegoat he has become. Critics cast him as cold, analytical and heartless; a bean-counter with no regard for the subtleties of rural life. The reality was rather different: Beeching was a self-effacing, good-humoured and highly intelligent man. As a PhD student at Imperial College London in the 1930s, he had worked on early plans for an atomic bomb. Many would say his brief career in infrastructure was altogether more destructive. Ernie Marples was, no doubt about it, a rogue,” said Lewis Baston, author of the Marples biography, who is looking for a publisher for his book.