The Social Anatomy of a Beeching Railway Closure A Case Study of Goathland and the Whitby Area 1963-65

This dissertation is a micro-history of the impact of a Beeching Report railway closure. It documents the powerful but unsuccessful campaign of the villagers of Goathland against the closure of their local railway. This campaign was strongly led and orchestrated by the local newspaper, the Whitby Gazette and community leaders. This orchestration emphasised the hardship that people would experience and was a catalyst for people’s negative perception of the closure and the alternative bus services. These perceptions of an adverse social impact proved not to reflect reality. The perceptions and the impact of a Beeching closure have not been widely studied by historians. However, for Goathland a wealth of archival material from the Whitby Gazette and the letters of protest written by the villagers have survived to form the basis of this study. New tools using the power of HGIS databases and analysis are applied to this material to portray a people-centric view of a closure. These tools are used to model how, in 1963, the railway had an emotional rather than practical value for the local community. From this starting point it shows that local perception of the impact of the railway closure was always going to be at variance with the reality. To the villagers the perception was important, not the reality. Bespoke accessibility models bring an objectivity to the role of public transport in villagers’ lives. These villagers were isolated after closure, but objectively they were isolated before, they just did not perceive that they were.