There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult. The railways are surrounded on all sides, almost everywhere, by urban development. Homes and businesses have to be relocated, earthworks have to be done, and it all has to be broken into tiny pieces done in 4-5 hour spans in the middle of the night or over Christmas, because the railway is live and too economically important to shut down for long periods of time. Doing any kind of upgrades at all on a live line is horrifingly expensive and slow. That's why HS2 is a completely new railway. The UK has reached the limit of adding capacity to the West Coast Main Line; further upgrades are possible in theory but can't solve the fundamental issue of the same rails being shared by fast and slow trains.

As for Beeching, it's not quite that simple. The roughly 25-35% of the country that's pretty left wing hate the Beeching cuts for the same reasons they hate all government cuts.

Despite my negative view on trains above, I'm actually a train enthusiast. I love taking the train. I love reading about how they work. There was a story on HN some days ago where a rail engineer talked in detail about how the high-speed rail record was set, I absolutely loved reading about it. My girlfriend had to tear me away from the screen. And I've often wondered about how to really scale up the railways in a big way.

In a way, railways are kind of the ultimate nerd dream. An ideal railway is a huge, smoothly operating and very safe high performance machine, entirely coordinated by engineers and planners. I think perhaps that's why it's such a political hot-button issue: a nationalised railway represents a very tangible instance of massive state planning and control. Decentralising it is difficult for various logistical and technical reasons, not only the politics of it.

Despite that the Beeching cuts have never been rolled back, even under the 3 terms of Labour government. Many of those lines made no sense, especially in the context of continually declining ridership and the ever rising traffic on the roads. It'd have been a very irrational government that continued ploughing money into rail instead of building motorways given the expressed preferences of the population at the time.

For unknown reasons that are still debated today (but which align perfectly with privatisation), the decades-long decline in train usage reversed and so now new lines are needed again. But they're different routes to the ones closed by Beeching. Those were mostly small rural lines.

> especially in the context of continually declining ridership and the ever rising traffic on the roads

One point of "unease" (to quote the Wikipedia entry) is that Marples was pro-road; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#cite_note-50

> A more critical interpretation is that after Macmillan named Marples as Minister of Transport, Britain’s transport policy swerved to the right, and became motivated by the kind of conflict of interest that Thompson notes can be loosely regarded as a form of corruption (9). Actually, in this case it may well have been a rather tight form of corruption. At the time that he was named minister, Marples owned 64,000 of the 80,000 shares of Marples Ridgeway, a civil engineering firm that specialised in building roads"

I as an ill-informed outsider cannot disambiguate how much of the shift to roads was from "expressed preferences" and how much was from "a form of corruption".

You wrote "nationalised railway represents a very tangible instance of massive state planning and control".

But .. so is a national road system. Your country spends billions on roads, which is pretty massive.

To add, I recall that the Netherlands also followed the post-war system of adding more highways/promoting cars, so I know it's not simply a corruption issue.

In the 1970s, protests against the increasing number of children deaths caused by cars resulted in the more pro-cycling infrastructure they have now, rather than prioritizing cars first, second, and third like they did in my country (the US) and, I believe, the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic... for background.

I can't help but also note that post-war UK manufactured cars, while the Netherlands did not.

> There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult.

While trains are touted as very efficient modes of transportation, and generally beloved by nerds, I'm skeptical, largely because train tracks are so under-utilized.

Train tracks take up as much space as many multi-lane highways. On highways, dozens of cars go by every minute. But a train car only passes through at best a few times an hour. I suspect that if you took one mile of train track and one mile of a highway with the same overall footprint, far more people/goods will move through the highway-mile every hour than the train-mile.

Don't have data to back this up, just a hunch. But if it's true, then even though trains are far more energy efficient than cars, they're likely far less real-estate efficient.

(Also, I do suspect that this is not always true. A heavily trafficked tunnel in/out of Manhattan's Penn Station is probably more efficient real-estate wise than an equivalent tunnel. But that's a very extreme case with super high densities).