Fun Boy Three

[nigel_wassell]

And to cap it all, Mrs Castle was being disingenuous (what? a politician being "economical with the truth" ... I don't believe it!) - the 3,000 route miles thus "saved" had only been earmarked for "non-development" (which, OK, might have meant closure) in an unpublished report entitled "The Development of the Major Trunk Routes," presented by Dr Richard Beeching to the previous Minister of Transport, Tom Fraser, in 1965, which was rejected by the latter and indirectly led to Beeching giving up the chairmanship of the British Railways Board some two years before the end of his contract. G. Freeman Allen wrote a rather caustic article on the subject in the May 1967 edition of "Modern Railways."

--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, "So It Goes 2512" <so_it_goes_2512@...> wrote:
>
> Yes, it is confusing, but here's the original message from Ray, and this should clear this up:
> 
> "As regards the date of the recording, there is some confusion because Mark Roman gives the dateline at the beginning of the news as being "Wednesday March 26th", which he then corrects to "25th". In 1967, March 26th was a Sunday, the 25th was a Saturday. Neither were a Wednesday. The very first news item (the most important) was headlined "The Railways". It was all about the British Transport minister, Barbara Castle's decision not to axe as much of the rail network as had previously been planned. Mark reports that she is saving over 3,000 miles of railways from getting the chop. That decision was actually announced in the British House of Commons on Wednesday, March 15th. See:
> 
> http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1967/mar/15/railway-network-map
> 
> I think what happened in the studio (possibly in poor lighting at night) was simply that Mark Roman was struggling to see the date, and he misread the "1" in the date (15th) as a "2"."
> 
> Best wishes
> Steve (TK)
> --- In peel@yahoogroups.com, "Nigel Wassell" <nigelw@> wrote:
> >
> > The "dateline" as enunciated by Mark Roman is certainly very garbled - to me it actually sounds like "March 26th," quickly corrected to "25th".  However, Wednesday March 15th is correct: quite apart from the fact that March 26th, 1967 was Easter Sunday, the "Basic Railway" (a.k.a. "Beeching, Part III") press release that lay behind the lead story in the news was published on March 15th.
> >
>