I congratulate all the people, most of them volunteers, who’ve worked so hard to restore parts of the Great Central Railway and now hope to reconnect the two reopened bits of the line (‘Heritage is the razzmatazz’: Great Central Railway plans to revive Victorian train route, 26 August). But what a scandal that it was ever shut. Had it been left in service, an upgrade would have cost a fraction of the money poured into Boris Johnson’s vanity HS2 project.
The closure came about because of the Beeching report, published in 1963. Dr Beeching had been employed to produce it by the then transport minister Ernest Marples. Mr Marples had been managing director of, and was still involved with, Marples Ridgway, a company that made much of its money from building motorways. Can it have been mere coincidence that his appointee wanted to close mainline railways in addition to making more justifiable cuts to remote branch lines?
Sadly, the incoming Labour government allowed much of the report to be implemented, possibly because it had many other things to deal with after what Harold Wilson called “13 years of Tory misrule” and a rightwing press, with an apparently short-term memory, eager to blame our country’s many woes on newly elected lefties.
Is it any surprise that those of us who were teenagers 60 years ago might now be suffering an unwelcome feeling of deja vu?
Brian Hughes
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
• I enjoyed your article on the ambitious plans for the Great Central Railway, of which I am a shareholder. My late friend David Clarke was chairman for many years and left the GCR a legacy in the form of a trust that could be used to benefit the railway in future. Being the only preserved steam mainline in the country, it attracts many film companies needing a 1950s location. The most recent was Stan and Ollie, which recreated the famous scene in The Music Box when the comedy duo struggled up a flight of steps with a piano. The producers cleverly substituted suitcases for the piano on Loughborough’s steep staircase on to the platforms.
Paul Foxall
Collingbourne Ducis, Wiltshire
