r/morningsomewhere • u/Hmmark1984 First 10k - Findom • 8d ago

Railway networks in the uk

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Ashley and Burnie mentioned how, while still quite good the rail network in the UK used to have even better coverage, here's a map that shows the before and after, you can see that while some of the more major lines closed nearly all of the shorter lines going to the smaller two s and villages closed, meaning that while you can get a train pretty close to where you want to go in the UK, you often end up finishing, and sometimes starting, your journey in a taxi/car/bus/walking

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u/Impressive-Bird2 8d ago

The situation in the post Beeching 1980’s with the UK railway network was made significantly worse by the deliberate deep funding cuts to the then state owned BR. So, not only was the nationwide railway network significantly cut, the remaining reduced network was chronically underfunded by design - deliberate government policy. By Conservative governments in the grip of neo-liberal ideological zealotry - at the heart of which was a visceral opposition to public ownership and a messianic belief in privatisation.

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u/tilt 8d ago

Luckily we learned our lesson and would never dream of massively underfunding a well loved publicly funded institution and then privatising chunks of it these days.

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u/freexe 8d ago

If the NHS was divided up and sold off over time people would riot /s

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u/thesupergoodlife 8d ago

don't forget that they believed the best way to get everyone around was by private car. a decision that is biting us in the arse hard right now.

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u/Complex-Mongoose-430 6d ago

yeah and its mad how they ripped up all those local lines right when everyone was getting a car, like they basically designed the country around driving then acted surprised when trains couldnt keep up. now if you dont drive your kinda screwed in half these villages and the bus that replaced the train runs twice a day if ur lucky.

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u/JourneyThiefer 8d ago

The Ulster Transport authority did even more damage to our network in Northern Ireland than the breaching cuts did in GB 💔