Waverley reopens nto Tweedbank

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PinzaC55
LNER A3 4-6-2
Posts: 1375
Joined: Wed May 20, 2009 2:36 pm

Re: Waverley reopens nto Tweedbank

Post by PinzaC55 »

I have an old booklet by the Railway Invigoration Society where they investigated the effects of the Beeching closures and the replacement bus services. They said that the theory was that when a rail line closed , passengers would get a bus to the nearest railhead and then a train for the rest of the journey.
However they found that in fact when a rail line closed, people either
a) drove
b) got a bus for the whole journey or most likely
c) didn't travel
The net effect being that the journey were entirely lost to rail and in most cases the replacement bus services were abandoned.
The other effect was that many people saw a place which had no rail service as being essentially ""unreachable" due to the slowness of bus services and the difficulty of finding bus services (obviously this was before the internet) so they simply didn't go to those places. That's one reason why feasibility studies nearly always fail , because they can't anticipate the "new traffic" reopened railways will generate.
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