This site shows the railway lines which are personal to me and can be found at Railways menu or individually at Station directory or Opening dates or Closure dates

The pages relate to my schooldays in Liverpool, walks on the Wirral Peninsula and holidays in north Wales, Shropshire, the Isle of Man, north Yorkshire and Cornwall

Dr Richard Beeching was recruited by the government from a very successful business career at ICI, to make the railways profitable again. By the early 1960s the rail industry was losing millions of pounds a year. His solution was simple - close down the bits that lost the money and concentrate on the things that trains did well such as fast journeys between cities. In 1963, at the time of the Beeching report, railways criss-crossed Britain, and even remote areas had stations but the Beeching report recommended taking an axe to about a third of the network - 5,000 miles of track, including hundreds of branch lines, over 2000 stations and tens of thousands of jobs

At the time he said: "Improved bus services could replace branch lines because only on 50% of the route mileage of British Railways, there is only 5% of the traffic... the real question is whether you want us to go on running these services at very high cost when the demand for them has very largely disappeared." The report was explosive

Some of my featured railway lines have been completely destroyed, others have been converted into country parks and some have continued running but with a reduced number of intermediate stations and some have been rebuilt as heritage railways.