A list of services included in this group is given in Appendix 2. They account for an annual train mileage of 68 m. and the route mileage to be closed to passenger traffic will be about 5,000.
The savings expected to result from these withdrawals are £33 m. per annum and the loss of revenue is expected to be £15 m. per annum (£12 m. in earnings on the services concerned and £3 m. in contributory revenue), yielding a net improvement of £18 m. per annum excluding track and signalling. There will also be further savings, when lines are completely closed after withdrawal of passenger services and when alternative arrangements have been made to deal with any desirable freight. In large part, these savings are attributable to passenger service withdrawals. So also are the economies which will follow as the administrative and service departments are contracted and reorganised.
The stations affected by the closure of passenger services are listed in Appendix 2 and details of rolling stock which will be rendered redundant are given in Appendix 3.
Decision with regard to the remaining stopping services will be reserved. for the present, until the most hopelessly uneconomic ones have been dealt with, but they will then be reviewed and should they be found to be uneconomic. they will be dealt with similarly.
Hardship
It would be folly to suggest that widespread closure of stopping train services will cause no hardship anywhere or to anybody, and the Transport Act, 1962 makes the consideration of hardship the special responsibility of Transport Users Consultative Committees, where objections to closures are lodged. For the purpose of judging the closure proposals as a whole, however, it is necessary to have some idea of the scale and degree of hardship which they are likely to cause.
With the exception of northern Scotland, and parts of central Wales, most areas of the country are already served by a network of bus services more dense than the network of rail services which will be withdrawn, and in the majority of cases these buses already carry the major proportion of local traffic. With minor exceptions, these bus services cater for the same traffic flows as the railways, on routes which are roughly parallel. Taken as a whole, they have enough spare capacity to absorb the traffic which will be displaced from the railways, which will do no more than replace the bus traffic which has been lost. over the last decade, and which will provide a very welcome addition to the revenue of the bus operators. The network of bus services is shown on Map No. 12.
In all these areas, cases of special difficulty will be rare, but there may be localities where there is not already a bus service connecting places at present served by rail. If the traffic displaced from rail has a density of over 1,000 passengers per week it provides the basis for an economic bus service of about eight buses each way. Where the traffic displaced is less than 1,000 passengers per week, and where a bus service does not exist already, some special arrangements may be necessary. Roughly a quarter of the services proposed for closure have a traffic density below 1,000, but it is estimated that only 122 miles of these routes are not already paralleled by bus services. In most areas of the country, therefore, it appears that hardship will arise on only a very limited scale.
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