Great Western Coffee Shop

Love that last graph!

Serpell would have made Beeching pale into insignificance. 

[snip]

 Thankfully we don't have such nonsense anymore...

Yet we still need just a degree of caution.   I've trawled around and found losses since the time of Serpell ... Aldwych tube, Allerton, Altofts, Ampress Works Halt, Ardrossan Winton Pier, Attercliffe Road and Brightside, Balloch Pier, Bedford St Johns, Boothferry Park Halt, Broad Street, Bury, Claydon West Branch, Corby, Coulsdon North, Croxley Branch, Elmers End to Sanderstead, Elsham, Epping (exclusive) to Ongar, Folkestone Harbour, Godley East, Gogarth and Abertafol, Holborn Viaduct, Kilmacolm branch, Llangelynin, Miles Platting, Navigation Road, Newhaven Marine, North Woolwich, Oldham Mumps and Shaw & Compton , Pendleton, Radipole, Rowntree Halt, Shorditch Tube, Sinfin branch, Tilbury Riverside, Tunbridge Wells West via Groombridge, Waddon Marsh and Beddington Lane, Wadsley Bridge, Weymouth Quay and Workington North.  Not so many of these in recent years and many special cases, but a few sadly lamented and not replaced by anything better. 

[snip] Not so many of these in recent years and many special cases, but a few sadly lamented and not replaced by anything better. 

I think that's a rather misleading list, as very many of those are indeed special cases where the previous BR station was replaced by something better (in many cases a metro style service).  And others are also special for some other reason, e.g. Shoreditch tube station, where (in contrast) a little used tube station was replaced by a National Rail station which now has around 10 x as much footfall.

Sir David Serpell, who has died aged 96, was a formidable Whitehall mandarin who in retirement produced for Margaret Thatcher's government the much-reviled Serpell Report, which postulated reducing the rail network to a skeletal 1,630 miles.
 
Serpell retired in August 1972, but he had a heavy workload ahead of him.

David Howell, the transport secretary, commissioned the report in May 1982 as he struggled to contain a British Rail deficit heading toward £240 million a year. He set Serpell's panel the remit of investigating BR's finances, with the inference that a strategy had to be found to keep costs down.
 
The Daily Telegraph observed: "Whether Sir David Serpell ever becomes a household name in the manner of that great railway cost-cutter Dr Beeching will depend greatly on whether the Government favours the more drastic options suggested by his committee." In the event, ministers retreated, but Serpell was still left with the opprobrium.

Howell's stratagem backfired spectacularly, for there was no way of eliminating BR's losses short of massive cuts and fare increases. When he received the report, he sat on it for a month, while a series of leaks – which Whitehall blamed on BR – caused alarm among commuters and the rail unions. The Labour Party rushed in to capitalise, and with a general election imminent there were severe jitters on the Tory back benches.

Publication of the report in January 1983 only made matters worse. Serpell and a majority of his panel set out a range of options: from retaining the network at 10,300 miles to cutting it to 10,000; 7,610; 6,120; 2,210 or just 1,630 miles, which would leave most of the country unserved.

They also proposed that BR economise on maintenance, renewals and signalling safety. And a minority report from Alfred Goldstein, a consulting engineer close to Margaret Thatcher's economic adviser Sir Alan Walters, pointed out that only if cut to 1,630 miles, with season ticket holders stripped of their 40 per cent discount, could the railways make money.

Howell was forced on to the back foot, having to stress as he introduced the report in the Commons that the government was not contemplating a programme of cuts. Serpell, whom the BR chairman Sir Peter Parker found "as cosy as a razor blade", came in for heavy criticism and even personal abuse, once being harangued by the guard on his train home to Devon.

The former Liberal leader Jo Grimond surmised that Serpell must wish he had changed places with Lord Franks, who was then examining whether government actions had contributed to Argentina's invasion of the Falklands. "How relaxing to examine anything as unemotive as a war," he commented.

Having developed an affection for the railways as a member of the BR board from 1974 until his report was commissioned, Serpell regarded criticism of himself as unfair. A minister had asked him a question, and he had answered it; it was no fault of his that the question was not a sensible one.

The Serpell Report left the government and BR exactly where they had been beforehand, and BR went on to reform itself from within under Sir Robert Reid. But the episode terminated Howell's ministerial career. Mrs Thatcher dropped him from the cabinet after the 1983 election. For several years afterwards, transport ministers faced the accusation from Labour and the unions that they were "implementing Serpell by stealth".

The episode was an unsatisfactory footnote to a successful Whitehall career, which led from the wartime ministry of food through the Treasury to Serpell's two permanent secretaryships.

David Radford Serpell was born in Plymouth on November 10 1911, the second son of Charles and Elsie Serpell. He was educated at Plymouth College and Exeter College, Oxford, where he took a third in History; he became an honorary fellow in 1992. He completed his studies at the University of Toulouse, Syracuse University, New York state (marrying the daughter of one of his professors) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Massachusetts.
Returning to Britain in 1937, Serpell went to work for the Imperial Economic Committee, then on the outbreak of war joined the ministry of food, eventually becoming private secretary to the junior minister, Major Gwilym Lloyd George. When Lloyd George was promoted to minister of fuel and power, Serpell went with him.

In 1945 Serpell moved to the Treasury, remaining there 15 years. As an assistant secretary he led British officials at trade talks with Denmark in 1949, and in 1954 negotiators with Persia on how that country could find a way of buying goods in dollars when its oil revenues were in sterling.

That year he was appointed an under-secretary with special responsibility for defence expenditure. When Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer convened a conference of Commonwealth "brass hats" at Camberley in 1957 to ponder the nuclear scenario, Serpell was one of the few civilians present.

In 1960 he moved to the ministry of transport as deputy secretary responsible for railways and roads; soon after, his minister, Ernest Marples, commissioned the Beeching Report which triggered the halving in size of the rail network. Serpell was also, in 1963, one of an Anglo-French working group which reported that a Channel tunnel could be built for £143 million.

That year, he moved on to the Board of Trade, being promoted to second permanent secretary in June 1966 when Harold Wilson gave the department greater responsibilities. At the end of that year he crossed to the Treasury in the same capacity to take charge of the oversight of government spending.
In 1968 Serpell became permanent secretary at the ministry of transport. The MoT's prime concern was promoting acceptance of the breathalyser; that Christmas he wrote to its 3,000 staff reminding them not to drink and drive. When Edward Heath established the Department of the Environment (which included the MoT) in 1970, Serpell was appointed its permanent secretary. He presided over this mega-department for two years, his ascendancy punctuated by rows with the young Michael Heseltine, one of its junior ministers.

Heseltine was unrepentant, saying: "After the Labour government, civil servants expected junior ministers to behave in the shy, retiring way to which they had become accustomed, and got rather a shock when someone turned up who gave orders. The permanent secretary tried to turn me into a training machine for 20-year-olds straight from Oxford whom he kept sending me as private secretaries, and I was not prepared to be treated like that."

Serpell retired in August 1972, but he had a heavy workload ahead of him. The next year he took the chair at the Nature Conservancy Council, staying there four years. In May 1977, just before he stood down, he declared the 172-acre Great Barrows limestone pavement in Lancashire, Britain's biggest, a Silver Jubilee nature reserve. He was also appointed to the National Environment Research Council, and served on the council of the National Trust.

In 1978 Peter Shore, the environment secretary, commissioned Serpell to run the rule over the Ordnance Survey. His verdict was unflattering: the OS would "need to transform itself from being a rather inward-looking and conservatively run organisation into one that looks to the future and is responsive to change and development." But he made no proposals to alter its status; in 1982 Heseltine, back at the DoE, shelved his report and recommended making the Ordnance Survey a trading fund.

He was appointed OBE in 1944 and CB in 1962, and knighted in 1968.

David Serpell, who died on July 28, was twice married: to Anne Dooley in 1938 (their marriage was dissolved in 1971) and secondly, in 1972, to Doris Farr, who died in 2004. His three sons by his first marriage survive him.

I like the way that the Vale of Rheidol is AXED in C3, but reinstated in option D, presumably as a highly important connection to Aberystwyth from... er... a waterfall.

What an excellent breakdown, John R - and indeed confirmation that it's been both ways.     Looking at it nicely tabulated, I appear to have left out a few closures - oops - such as Dover Marine and Etruria, and we currently have services suspended with no resumption date at Norton Bridge, Barlaston and Wedgwood.

The re-opening list is impressive and would be the more so if you add stations on lines that were open right through anyway and (conversely) the closure list would grow by a few if you / I were to list lines that had no stations on them that have gone.   March to Spalding went (I suspect) while Serpell was at the printer's.  Others such as the curve at Newport were quite recent, and the curve at Westbury has been and gone in the last few years.   Reading West towards Didcot?

Also left out ... stations which have moved a very little (and may have been renamed) - Balloch Central to Balloch and Uckfield - both to eliminate level crossings.

There are now no scheduled passenger services over the west curve as the Cross-Country trains reverse in the main station but there are essentially hourly container trains in both directions between Southampton and the Midlands.

Happy to edit the list if you think it worthwhile.

Yes, please ... a good reference, but no huge hurry as I suspect there are still a handful of others; here are some more possibles from me:

Gone
... Lincoln St Mark's
... Abercynon North
... Smethwick West
... Farringdon to Moorgate via Barbican
... Manchester United Football Ground
... for completeness of the list, is it worth listing other intermediate stations on lines closed?

Arrived
... Okehampton
... Aylesbury Vale Parkway
... Newcastle to Metro Centre via Dunston
... Stansted Airport

Rose Grove to Hebden Bridge and Chippenham to Trowbridge; neither line officially closed, I don't think ... just down to a bare minimum of services (like 1 each way per day, high season summer Saturdays only!)

Mention of curves one that shouldn't have shut is Bradford North Loop. 

Bradford Junction North -Bradford Junction West (26ch.)
8-26 a.m. SX Calne—Bristol Temple Meads
8-30 a.m. SO Calne—Bristol Temple Meads
5-25 p.m. SX Melksham—Bradford-on-Avon
7-15 a.m. Bradford-on-Avon—Chippenham
3-55 p.m. SX Bristol Temple Meads—Melksham

London Overground  Split Outer Circle. via East London line, South London Line, West London Line and North London Line.

Has anyone mentioned the  Robin Hood Line reopened tunnel at Annesley plus reopened stations?

What about the DLR new stations near to old some shut as early as WW1.

Also London Overground  Split Outer Circle. via East London line, South London Line, West London Line and North London Line.

Mention of curves one that shouldn't have shut is Bradford North Loop.