Beeching Report And Britain's Railway Heritage

EDM number 1148 in 2012-13, proposed by George Galloway on 05/03/2013.
Categorised under the topic of Railways.

That this House notes that March 2013 is the 50th anniversary of the Beeching Report which produced an unprecedented culling of Britain's railways; further notes this was just three years after the last steam engine built by British Railways, 92220 Evening Star, rolled out of Swindon works presaging an accelerated scrapping of the steam engine stock; further notes that tens of thousands of trainspotters and railway lovers banded together in the ensuing years to purchase and restore hundreds of miles of abandoned railway lines and save more than 200 hundred steam engines from the scrapyards; further notes that Yorkshire has some of the best heritage railways, including the North Yorkshire Moors Railways, the busiest in the country traversing the beautiful countryside from Pickering to Whitby and the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, which the late hon. Member for Keighley and then Bradford South, Bob Cryer, played a central role in saving, and also has the National Railway Museum at York in which are preserved some of the most aesthetically pleasing products of railway engineering anywhere in the world; and pays tribute to those tens of thousands of people who have made it possible for hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to continue to enjoy the UK's railway heritage every year.

This motion has been signed by a total of 18 MPs.