Broadly true but there are some pretty big provisos. The 1950s Modernisation Plan was British Railways' biggest misstep. Intended to bring BR out of the steam

Broadly true but there are some pretty big provisos. The 1950s Modernisation Plan was British Railways' biggest misstep. Intended to bring BR out of the steam age, it was hobbled by politics, internal rivalries and short-sightedness: famously, dozens of new locomotive types were commissioned rather than standardising on two or three. To a large extent Beeching was a reaction against that ("you've had your chance") rather than an attempt to develop a successful railway for the 1970s and beyond. Beeching did make some methodological mistakes (and again, there's much hindsight involved here, but many were pointed out at the time). I think the most infamous is not fully accounting for the traffic that branch lines fed onto main lines - a broad assumption that closing the branch line will save all its costs without impacting on the business elsewhere. And BR under Beeching had an unwillingness to consider new ways of working that would have made the railway more economical. Eastern Region under Gerry Fiennes had great success with Paytrains - i.e. you remove the staff from stations and expect people to buy a ticket on a train - and in running short multiple units rather than full locomotive-hauled trains. In 2016 this is how most rural railways in Britain are run. But Beeching's BR refused to consider it on a national scale. (Fiennes' book, "I Tried To Run A Railway", is an engrossing read and worthwhile for anyone interested in this part of history.)