They could have kept the land the routes ran over though. One of the reasons Beaching gets so much blame is that not only did he close lines he sold parts of t

They could have kept the land the routes ran over though. One of the reasons Beaching gets so much blame is that not only did he close lines he sold parts of them off for little return so that they couldn’t be reopened without compulsory purchase orders because they've been built on. Today we could massively improve our transport infrastructure if that hadn’t happened.