Page:The Reshaping of British Railways (Beeching Report).pdf/19

 working for engines, vehicles and men. Such trains give rise to a high proportion of overtime working and they depend upon the availability of reserve coaching stock which is expensive to supply, maintain, and assemble, and which is idle for most of the year. The extent to which reserve stock has been held to cover peak demands in the past, and its gross under-utilisation, is shown by the following table, which relates to 1959:—

A large number of the coaches available for high peak traffic were only required on a limited number of occasions as the following table, relating to the last 6,000 vehicles in the fleet, shows:—

The annual cost of providing the 6,000 coaches was £3·4m. Against this it was estimated that they only earned £0.5m. after allowing for all other costs of the movements concerned.

Since the beginning of 1959 the number of passenger-carrying gangway coaches has been reduced by 5,584 and by the end of 1965 stock will not be available for use at high peak periods. Efforts will be made to control these peaks by seat reservation schemes and by fares policy, as is the custom with airline services.

Stopping-Train Services

As a group, stopping-trains serve the more rural communities by linking small towns and villages with each other and, sometimes rather indirectly, with one or more major towns.

They merge into semi-fast services at one end of the range, where some semi-fast services could equally well be defined as stopping services, having regard to the traffic potential of the places where they stop as well as to their spacing. At the other end of the range, they merge very much further into suburban services. A suburban service has many of the characteristics of a stopping service, and is distinguished mainly by the intensity of its daily commuter peaks.

Railway stopping services developed as the predominant form of rural public transport service in the last century, when the only alternative was the horse-drawn vehicle and when the availability of private transport of any kind was very limited. Even in those days, when there was no satisfactory alternative and when fares were the present-day equivalent of 4½d. per mile third class, many of these services failed to pay.

Today, rail stopping services and bus services serve the same basic purpose. Buses carry the greater part of the passengers moving by public transport in rural areas, and, as well as competing with each other, both forms of public transport are fighting a losing battle against private transport.