Dr. Beeching's Bitter Pill

The English invented railways, and have never quite recovered from the pride and guilt of their creation. Nowhere else on earth does rundown rolling stock excite such tantrums or such tenderness. Britons venerate the shabby Victorian discomfort of antiquated first-class carriages; they despair if the diesel hauling them pants into a station 40 seconds late. When a moneylosing branch line closes down, the island is roiled with grief. Cried the headline over a lengthy London Times story last year: THE TIDDLYDIKE BRANCH LINE DIES TODAY. Sorrow had hardly faded before British Railways raised fares to pay for other uneconomical Tiddlydikes.

Screamed London's evening paper headlines": FARES SHOCK! Sprouts & Privacy. Last week fare shocks and Tiddlydike nostalgia reached a record peak. Dr. Richard Beeching, the blunt, brusque businessman hired--for $67,000 a year, highest salary ever paid a British civil servant--to shunt the nationalized railways out of the red, announced a nationwide 10% fare boost.

Dr. Beeching's bitterest pill was not the price increase, though it marked a 50% rise in ticket prices in 30 months (to 5.25-c- a mile for first class, v. a U.S.

average of 3.87-c-). What was hard to swallow was the realization that if Beech-ing succeeds in adapting to modern needs and techniques a 50,000-mile network designed for the 1880s, scores of branch lines and hundreds of its 7,000 stations will disappear. The last of the beloved "puffing billies" will yield to gaseous diesels or electric locomotives, and the aromatic privacy of the old first-class passenger compartment will give way to open, air-conditioned cars with central aisles, airliner seats and Muzak.

Britons are waxing prematurely nostalgic for the bitter Brussels sprouts and lumpy "brown Windsor" soup that have turned passengers' stomachs for decades. Plans to demolish London's dark, satanic Euston Station have stirred protests that read as if the bulldozers were marching on Buckingham Palace. Britain's trains, in fact, are not markedly more uncertain, uncomfortable or unwashed than railways the world over, but Englishmen like to think they are.

Nowhere to Nowhere. Hundreds of Englishmen exist for the sole purpose of keeping branch lines running, raising cash to rent doomed sections from Railway Boss Beeching, making weekend pilgrim ages to such officially abandoned routes as the Bluebell ("Nowhere to Nowhere") loop in Sussex. Despite a petition signed by 25,000 rail buffs, the Society for the Reinvigoration of Unremunerative Branch Lines in the United Kingdom (SRUBLUK) failed to keep open the scenic reach between Westerham and Dunton Green in Kent last October.

Generations of Britons have made a hobby of Bradshaw, the defunct, encyclo pedic railway guide that Sherlock Holmes knew by heart. A fervent Brad shaw buff's severest censure of a fellow devotee: "He is rather weak on his Sun day locals." Nonetheless, Beeching last week was going ahead with a 1 5-year, $4.2 billion cost cutting program. "Railways," sighed a British Transport Commission official, "will never be the same again."

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