‘Restoring Your Railway’: A Missed Opportunity?

9 October 2024  |  Guest blogger  |  Rail

‘Restoring Your Railway’ was, ostensibly, a scheme to restore railway lines and stations that were closed under the 1960’s Beeching Axe. It has now itself, ironically, been axed. The Chancellor’s announcement last July was met with mixed reactions. Many campaign groups reacted with dismay, not least Campaign for Better Transport, who were instrumental in lobbying for the fund in the first place. Others suggested it was no great loss, the small £500m fund having been only enough to open around 25 miles of track to begin with, with much of the money to date having likely been spent on feasibility studies for schemes that have made little progress since. 

This doesn’t mean that old railway lines will ever be reopened again; individual schemes will be rolled into a wider review of capital spending by the Department for Transport. The claim, however, that cancelling (the remainder of) the programme will save £85m next year sends a signal that the Government are unlikely to prioritise these schemes in the near future, a signal that has rightly been criticised given the urgent need to get more people taking the train, and the wider benefits expanding the railway would bring. But I also want to pick up on a different point; that cancelling the ‘Restoring Your Railway’ programme is a waste of a good brand. 

The brilliance of ‘Restoring Your Railway’, is that it is both good policy and good politics. Expanding the railway would bring social, economic and environmental benefits to parts of the country currently isolated from the public transport network. The rhetorical framing, meanwhile, of restoration (or reconnection) powerfully taps into a feeling of nostalgia many feel for those railways that were axed under Dr Beeching, provoking a strength of emotion that merely proposing a new railway might not. More broadly, the sense of loss towns and villages feel for their old station or branch line is a microcosm of the wider feeling of ‘left-behindness’ people in many parts of the country feel and the loss of a focal point for their local community.  

Whether a railway project is, in an engineering sense, a new line or a ‘restoration’ isn’t that important. Indeed, some Restoring Your Railway funding has gone to brand new stations, such as White Rose in West Yorkshire. The brand of ‘Restoring Your Railway’ offered us as transport advocates two key opportunities. Firstly, to sell investment into the railway to the Government, as something they could benefit from electorally. Secondly, to sell expanding the railway to the wider public, in a way that might chime with the public’s imagination in a way that ‘showpiece’ schemes such as HS2 (which for all its benefits of released capacity, it always struggled to shake off the perception of ‘just being a fast train to London’) might not.  

Restoring Your Railway was far from perfect, in the way it was executed during its short lifespan. The ceremonial axing of the scheme, however, is not just a setback in the material agenda of expanding the rail network, but also the waste of a powerful narrative that may have helped us make it happen. Perhaps, down the line, it too might be restored. 

This guest blog was written by Harry Burr, Joint Chief Executive of Enroute.