1976: The TRAIN STATION with NO TRAINS | Nationwide | Weird and Wonderful | BBC Archive
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- Опубликовано: 17 сен 2023
- John Stapleton reports from Tavistock North railway station in Devon, which was closed by British Rail in the late 1960's following the Beeching Report, but which has since been converted into living accommodation by its former station master, Ron Hooper. Ron lives in the station with his wife, and together they still tend to the abandoned station.
This clip is from Nationwide, originally broadcast 5 January, 1976.
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If anyone wondering what happened to the station since, Ron Hooper lived there with his wife until their deaths in 1999, and it was later fully restored and converted into self service holiday cottages in the 2010's.
Thanks for the update Larry
Cheers for the update on the story, never thought I'd see you commenting on the railways though 😅
ruclips.net/video/zJ5A8Ts1E2c/видео.htmlsi=PY9vgavCCb0GfOnB
Well, 'restoration' would have involved relaying the tracks and running trains...
Sadly so many of places like this were turned in to holiday cottages
The station was closed on 6 May 1968. It continued to be lived in by the former station master and then his widow until 1999.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock_North_railway_station
he died win his happy place.
He probably would have been saddened that it was turned in to holiday cottages. The "flats" of the countryside.
@@WhatALoadOfTosca He probably would have been a damn sight more saddened if it was demolished. As it is, it's been restored and Grade II listed and there's even talk of bringing the trains back again - although not to that station.
@@gordonbruce2618 Either way not a good thing.
John Stapleton's outfit and haircut look as much a relic of a bygone era as the station! Let's hope the rails can be restored to Tavistock and onward to Okehampton before too much longer.
I wouldn't hold you breath, sadly. Only Scotland and Wales seem to be able to reopen railway lines.
Glad Ron and his wife lived out their lives there.
So shortsighted and now the government are regretting the closure of these rail lines.
Are they? I really doubt it…
The people regret it. The government doesn't care.
@@_Madfly
The government just cares about squandering millions on High Speed Rail.
The really shortsighted part wasn't the closures, it was the way the trackbed was parcelled up and sold off piecemeal, salting the earth so lines couldn't be reopened. It's not like the land was worth that much. Even Beeching himself didn't recommend that.
Serving all of 800 people a week it was doomed to close.
When Tavistock was closed it was a RAILWAY Station. It was at least a decade later BBC decided to follow America's lead and call them train stations. As a rather reactionary boss of mine complained as we waited on a freezing platform after our train had been cancelled "railway station was more honest, there's always a railway there but no guarantee of their being any trains"
we are not yet the 51st state. like calling forwards attackers - in football ( not soccer )
I think it’s fair to say, that Beeching and his government really didn’t take into account the emotional attachment to the railways, the people of the uk had. It wasn’t perfect, nor was our coal, steel or other heavy industry, that were destroyed without thinking of the social damage done, but people really seemed to take a pride in it.
This poor guy just couldn’t and wouldn’t let go.
So many industries finally finished off by the Tories in the 1980s, meant that men in particular lost purpose, a sense of belonging, and with that their colleagues to talk to, affecting the mental health of the nation. I was told recently that men don’t talk face to face, they talk shoulder to shoulder. You only have to look at that suicide statistics for men. Yes I’m overthinking this, but also, I’m really not.
In no way are you overthinking it because it's the absolute cold, hard truth. It's heartbreaking what happened to the industrial might of this once great land. All of it taken away without one single thought about what would happen to the communities that relied on those jobs and the sense of belonging that came with it. I see the chaos and apathy everyday here in South Wales. The Valleys have been utterly decimated ever since the coal mines were shut in favour of importing cheaper coal from China etc...
@@PJV1990 thanks Katie I appreciate you saying that. I work with an (amazing) guy that started the Men’s Sheds in Ireland. I hope there’s similar in Wales.
The 50s - 80s was en era were for whatever reason the government destroyed most of the old infrastructure
Tories gonna tory. It's what they do, asset stripping is their business.
@@Hackney_Boy-DoesntReadReplies the tories and labour are basically the same party. Both are leftist in nature. Now more so than ever.
And now we have over 100 heritage railways run by volunteers.
I regularly visit the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. They run much better trains and services than Northern Rail.
Of course they do. It's Yorkshire.
It made sense in the short term but now we could do with our rail network or the canals as they could handle bulk transit in a lower carbon way.
It never made sense back then either ! Stranding rural communities to the bus. Many lines would have stayed open if Beeching could do maths. He only counted the revenue generated from the branch line, not from say London to the branch line. Furthermore, we now take into account things like social need and the environment. Just think of the waste, building lines, the construction deaths all to be ripped up. Sir John Betjeman knew we would regret it and he was right.
Sadly getting regular folk from A to B does not balance the books. Hence, we need to supplement that case with additional benefits.
What a lovely place to live! I always remember watching Catweazle as a kid, and he found an old station to live in. It was called Duck Halt. John Stapleton had the perfect broadcasters voice.
That was the second series wasn't it? He lived an an old water tank in the first I think...
@@Larry Yes you are correct. I've got both series on DVD.
Yes @@Larry, he called it Castle Saburac or similar
I'd have loved to live there!
Lovely place . I'd loved to have lived here , so quiet and peaceful with nature all around . Actually I envy him and can understand why he stuck around.
You can live there. It is holiday cottages now.
It wasn't he only one in the world, or even in Europe. Bastogne, in Belgium, for many years also had a staffed station without any trains. One could even buy tickets to or from the station which were valid on the bus to the nearest actual railway station where one could take the train.
I never realised what a stylish man John Stapleton is
Dartmouth railway station never had any trains, the station was built but agreements to build the rails never came through so it was only used as a ticket office. 🙂
It had boats instead iirc.
And now you can't buy tickets there either.
Great to see that the station still exists, fully restored and you can stay there on holiday.
This evokes childhood memories for me, of me and my sister playing near a disused railway line like this in Fairwater in Cardiff in the 1980s. Our line must also have been cut by Beeching, and it's really sad to see such railway majesty abandoned all over the country, because of one callous man.
Beeching did not really come from a railway background and so it was thought of as a fresh look at the problem. Remember that the road transport lobby was well (or ill) represented in the government and with the rise in private car ownership a serious re-think was necessary on the part railways could play in an integrated system. That clearly wasn't going to happen. The Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, with serious road transport interests, retired to, and died in, the South of France as I remember. There were some staggeringly filthy dirty tricks played in the anti-rail lobby to massage and downright falsify figures. But really the writing was on the wall at the close of WWII and 'The Railways' had been a convenient political football long before that!
@@ianmayes8072you are right about the scumbag Marples. Government corruption to the max: Marples was half of one of Britain's biggest road building firms, raking in huge profits from government contracts to build roads, like huge parts of the M6 motorway, and the Awsworth bypass in Nottinghamshire, etc. Beeching is just the guy who was in the public spotlight, so to speak, and everybody blames him, but it was the scumbag Marples with his corrupt racket, (mis)using his position as minister of transport to close and destroy so many miles of our railway network (& putting so many 1000's of people out 0f work in the process) in order to force people on to the roads (and so giving himself an excuse that there was a need to build more roads), so creating more profit for his own road building company (and pocket). Just 1 casualty of his regime was the Peak line (Derby to Manchester), which was fully financially viable; there was no valid case for closure, yet Marples, who owned the Bardon Hill quarries in Leicestershire, didn't like the quarries in Great Rocks Dale (near Buxton) competing with his quarries, which they did by bringing their stone over the Peak line, so he misused his office to get that line closed. It was later found out that he was fiddling his taxes and doing the country out of £1000's of unpaid tax, was tipped off of impending prosecution, and skipped the country to avoid being arrested .
Railways were in decline after people much preferred to use buses and coaches in the 1930's
and cars from the 1950's.
Essentially, railways became obsolete and alarmingly ran huge losses for years long before Beeching.
@@ianmayes8072 Marples allegedly evaded tax payments and scuttled abroad (where his money was) before he could be detained here. He eventually got away with it and repaid a fraction of what he'd owed.
Train station with no trains. Before I watched I thought this was going to be about any station in the north west of England in 2023.
Good news on this. I googled this station and the main station building has been converted into 3 holiday let's, and the station masters house has been converted into a private home. A great addition would be to put the tracks back and have railway carriages also converted into holiday let's, as I've seen on other old stations on RUclips. I was worried it was all demolished and was now another Tesco's.
...or maybe even have the line reinstated as a now profitable service, like Okehampton is.
@@henryrolls1655 That's what they should have done nationally instead of HS2. It's far more profitable to already immensely rich people to be destroying peoples lives whose property is in the way plus the countryside as a whole than to have a far more sensible and cheaper alternative.
HS2 if completed properly would have relieved pressure on the WCML which is running at capacity opening up more freight paths and taking lorries off the road, as it is they've already cut the Leeds leg of HS2 and this week, announced that the Manchester section is under review and may now not be built and the final few mikes into central London has been put back by at least two years due to cost. So what we will end up with is a High Speed rail service that stars at Old Oak Common, a complete faff to get to from certain parts of London and only goes as far as Birmingham and then use existing 125 mph lines for the remainder of its journey so billions of pound will have been wasted as the link will not do what it was intended to do.
Not far away in Devon was a working station which never had trains. Dartmouth was served only by a ferry from Kingswear, connecting with services to Paignton, Torquay and Exeter.
There is a long-standing proposal to reinstate a local service from Tavistock to Plymouth, and one day the missing section between Okehampton and Tavistock (now partly in use as a preserved railway) may return. This would provide an alternative Exeter-Plymouth route inland from the vulnerable, flood-prone main line.
Stapleton looks like Doyle from The Professionals 😅
Specsavers on Monday?
Now *THIS*... This is what should be shown more from the Beeb's archives
In 1976 only America had "train" stations - ours were still always railway stations.
Nice place to call home.
What a sad story. A little like tending the grave of a loved one after they have departed. Good for him to remain in a cherished place until the bulldozers come in and another new supermarket or car park arrives. All change!
as other have said, the station is still there and is for let cottages. they have recently reopened some stations in that part of the country that where closed at the same time. So potentially it could reopen at some point
I'm old enough to remember when we called them railway stations.
i bet you can still hear rons whistle today, even though he must have died a long time ago
I wonder if it's still there
No he means the man
@@Croydon387 I'm talking about the train station
Nature always reclaims its own
But it was the cleanest train station in the nation and had no crashes.
We won't be meeting again on the slow train
Reminds me of that series from 'Sapphire and Steel'; they built a set for that, but I can imagine this abandoned railway station would be suitably eerie at nighttime! There is something sublimely beautiful about abandoned industrial structures being reclaimed by nature.
Sadly, today the name "Tavistock" is better known as a trans clinic with no trans 😮
4:03 The 1976 Zoom meeting.
The station building is still there is it not ? The footbridge has gone ,and the signal box as well ? Last time l was there . Hopefully the trains will be back in a few years !?
that station would be great if reopened and some stuff that chuffs run through there ...too bad the viaduct over double waters is missing... - but any short scenic length of track will attract revenue ...drinking cider in the buffet car of a chuffer train ...oooooh arrrrrrr!!!
some of the devon heritage routes havent done that well
The LSWR Route was run down by the GWR biased western region. Faster diesels through into North Cornwall and down to Plymouth would still have been useful as the reopening to Okehampton has shown
A hundred years from now HS2 will still be in a half built abandoned state.
Tragic.
Hi there Ron, this is me from the future, 2023 to be exact. Don`t worry cause the railways are in great hands and they are building a super fast rail link from London (ish) to Birmingham. It`s bang on budget at £100 odd billion and will be a boon to the passengers or the companies building it!
Very funny. You forgot to mention that some of the planned routes have recently been cancelled.
Rumour is that HS 2 is to be renamed " The Sewerage Line" as it will eventually link two moslem cess pits, Birmingham and London.
He’d make a fortune on Airbnb now
This station was renovated on Property Ladder - series 7, episode 6 - the episode is here: ruclips.net/video/zJ5A8Ts1E2c/видео.htmlsi=PY9vgavCCb0GfOnB
It would of been demolished if he never cared for it like he did after it closed, good his wife stayed there after he died also
Why was this so sad?
People feel sentimental about all the closures but in truth, nationalised railways
had been running massive financial losses for decades,...branch lines never made
a profit ever since inception.
@@malthusXIII-fo3ep the station closure wasn't what I was referring to. It was more about the guy caring for it, mostly by himself, and knowing he's been dead for decades now. It also reminded me of the film Silent Running in a way.
In some ways, it's a real tragedy that the railway engine was invented before the car.
I thought he was going to say 800 people a day but 800 a week? That's very low traffic. Some sympathy for Beeching maybe?
Hundreds of small, minor stations probably never saw even 800 A MONTH!
In 1976 they were called RAILWAY stations.
And if were still open today it would employ no staff.
Beaching gets a bad rep because the public are not often told how quiet and lose making these stations were.
800 people a week is tiny there are bus routes by me that more as many people in 90 minutes.
Many small rural stations probably never saw even 800 a month!
Hmm! Beeching was a pal of Marples, Minister of Transport, who had considerable financial interests in the road transport sector. The railways had suffered massive under investment during and after the Second World War but a decision was taken (justified in many ways) to slow a switch of power source from coal to oil because coal was available in this country (at what later proved to be considerable political cost) whereas importing oil would have been a disaster since Britain's foreign debts were horrendous and the the balance of trade dire. That is why the standard class engines were built, to keep the railways going until we could afford the oil tointroduce diesel traction. But some of those in power were convinced they cuold make more money from road transport than from an integrated transport system. So reports and evaluations were commissioned. And in order to get lines closed , especially those with marked seasonal variations in traffic, were assessed at their quietest times. There are many examples of huge and quite unecessaryinvestment programmes (freight yards, electric signalling systems, engine sheds) just so they would distort the figures. ("We can't possibly keep paying this year after year! " Much later railway staff would still say"Look out. They're going to close the line!" every time something was renewed or improved.) It is all very well being nostalgic about railways but they did have to change. It is just that it could have been done better.
Railway station, thank you. Not 'train station'.
It's a Railway Station. "Train Station" is an Americanism, and I defy you to find a written example before 1990.
1976 Jimmy Saville was the face of British Rail adverts : 'we're getting there'.
I think that was 1977. If I remember correctly BR (InterCIty and Awayday) changed agencies toward the end of 1976.
I thought that was King Charles in the thumbnail
How sad.
Such a lovely story. It's nice to hear a station referred to as "a station", rather than a "train station".
I'm even starting to notice this baby-talk on signposts and I'm beginning to wonder if my liberal attitude towards the Teletubbies was unwise.
You just silly billy, you.
It is an americanism and also a colonialism. Probably Neighbours.
Railway station, not train station
Note that it is simply referred to as a 'station' as was the common usage then. You might say 'Railway Station ' and we had 'bus stations but never train stations.
@irsw51 No it was common usage as railway station too and the correct term. The title is wrong. Thousands of young people say should of instead of should have. It doesn't make it right! It's a silly argument.
Railway station
Beeching was very much scapegoated as the villain for all these line closures but in reality he was just the civil servant who wrote the report that the government then acted on…..and the railways at the time were losing money hand over fist. with hindsight, a more gradual programme of closures would have been better, to allow time to find alternative public transport links for affected communities and not leave them stranded
Secretly running the Hogwarts express 🤫
What happened to the station then what is it now? Should be made into a working museum taking passengers
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock_North_railway_station
I’m sure this is the station I’ve seen on Four in a Bed that’s been made into holiday cottages.
I don't think that was the right thing to do they could have made it into tourist attraction and brought some economy to local area running steam trains you get people from all around the world coming and that can be run off gas not just coal@@jonathanw844
Try reading the comments.
I would imagine that Ron called it a RAILWAY Station not Train!
Gestapo leather jacket
RAILWAY STATION
Spoiler alert : This is not real it's from a Monty Python skit.
Of course it’s real.
@@jemmajames6719 See above comment.
*Railway Station
One day trains will return to tavistock
People won't accept it but BR was the second most efficient railway in Europe, the narrative is to rewrite history so the disastrous privitisation is the only alternative and we can't possibly have state run Railways, if you speak to proper railwaymen the current system is broken and fragmenting of the system won't help when we need Railways to help control environmental issues in the future.
Pretty sad really..
Railway station.
'Bustling' with 800 passengers a week... For all those who criticise the Beeching Report, the answer is the people who abandoned the railways for the car and the bus.
And most rural areas havent got reliable bus services or none a toll, Last bus leave villages into town either 3 in the afternoon or just after 6 and passengers are left stranded.
@scottpeacock5492 Nit just rural areas. I live in a city and buses on routes out of the centre stop running between 7pm and 8pm, meaning no bus back if going into the city centre for the evening.
They measured the number of passengers on the tourist line from kings Lynn to Cromer on a Tuesday in. February. Ernest Maples the minister of transport wife owned a road construction company
The Beeching Report was a sham. Doing surveys when schoolchildren were on holiday, seaside places in the winter, that sort of thing. Beeching admitted he wished he could have closed more. The vile b'stard. He could not even add up. He only counted revenue generated from the branch line. But failed to add fares from say London. This makes a big difference to say seaside branches of you added the daytrippers and holidaymakers. He literally did more damage to Britain's railways than the Luftwaffe !!
@keithmacdonal2466 most of the checks on lines performances were done like this...they knew what they were doing did the Tories..oh yes the Tory government..Beeching was the fall guy.
This reminds me of @theoldstationrenivation
You can see how decrepit it all looked, investment dried up after Nationalisation
by Attlee and Labour in 1948.
It became make do and mend as most people were poor after the war and could not pay more tax
to fund it all. Large numbers of passengers had had enough after the 16 day strike in Dec. 1955.
Millions much preferred direct travel by bus, coach and car.
The Beeching Axe in 1963 was inevitable,...it should have been swung a century earlier as the vast
majority of branch lines saw little passenger traffic, running losses - year after year.
All those people, 800 each week. No wonder the place closed.
Ernest Marples and his road building business, these days it's Jacobs infilling old bridges to stop greenways being built. Never underestimate the car lobby.
Beeching only counted revenue generated from the branch line not the money from say London. If he had done his sums correctly, few lines would have closed.
@@Hackney_Boy-DoesntReadRepliesthe road network was pretty rough but even so more people indeed did the local journeys by car , it took ages to get the Okehampton by-pass planned approved and built which was the main bottleneck out of Cornwall to Exeter
@@vicsams4431only around a fifth would have survived. Some lines were never going to survive. The worst of all of this is the tracks were lifted so quickly. When Labour took office they should have just mothballed lines,then we may have had some survive 😢
Using the financial model post Beeching, few lines would have closed. Indeed, had he done his sums right, he would have included revenue from cities TO the branch lines, not just counted revenue FROM the lines themselves. Then he fixed the figures, doing surveys when schoolchildren were on holiday, visiting seaside resorts in the winter etc. Beeching did more damage to our railways than the Luftwaffe !
British railway stations used to look so nice. They were staffed around the clock and had heated waiting rooms and even a tea shop. Now they are dehumanizing brutalist concrete with a bare platform and a plastic bus shelter with a cold metal bench if you are lucky.
800 passengers a week says it all
And that was probably during the summer holiday season; dead in the winter.
A heritage line before it's time, maybe it always was.
You are looking at this from a profit point of view and ignoring the public service aspect. As far back as the 1930s railway companies were looking at lower-cost ways to serve isolated communities using the existing infrastructure with lower-cost alternatives like diesel railbuses. Unfortunately WW2 put the kybosh on that! The motor car has been a blight on Britain. Road deaths dwarf railway fatalities, passenger mile for passenger mile (or at least they certainly did when I was working on the figures) and cars are a major contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide, although no politician dares bit the bullet and say so!
No-one would have called it a ‘train station’ in 1976. That’s a recent nonsensical influence from America and Ireland.
It’s a railway station. Railway lines, not train lines. The British invented the railway and now talk utter nonsense about them.
Which is more spicy, mild or medium?
Me: Looking at thumbnail. Damn what is Sleepy Joe doing there?
Obsessive compulsive disorder?
Except for the weeds...
like most government jobs
Since when has a railway station been a "train station"?? 🤢🤮
Unless its in North America, this was a railway station. The BBC used to be better than this.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock_North_railway_station