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The Beeching Report, published in March 1963, announced the closure of 4,000 miles of railway line and 2,000 stations.

Against footage of steam trains rushing past, some of the most romantic, beautiful, brutal, strange and comic station names are read out as testimony to "the threads that bound the nation together".

The first part of the report was called 'The Reshaping of Britain's Railways'. The cuts carried out between 1962 and 1968 resulted in staff numbers being slashed from 500,000 to 300,000; miles of railway line reduced from 17,000 to 13,000; locomotives culled from 14,000 to 5,000 and carriages reduced from 36,000 to 20,000. The number of miles travelled shrank from 335 million to 250 million.

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