Editing Beeching cuts (section)

===Acceptance of rail subsidies===
By 1968, the railways were still losing money and Beeching's approach appeared to many to have failed. It has been suggested that by closing almost a third of the network Beeching achieved a saving of just £30 million, whilst overall losses were running in excess of £100 million per year.{{sfn|Henshaw|1994|p=}}{{page needed|date=June 2023}} However, the precise savings from closures are impossible to calculate.{{sfn|Gourvish|1986|p=}}{{page needed|date=June 2023}} The Ministry of Transport subsequently estimated that rail operating costs had been cut by over £100 million in the wake of the Beeching Report but that much of this had been swallowed up by increased wages. Some of the branches closed acted as feeders to the main lines, and that feeder traffic was lost when the branches closed; the financial significance of this is debatable, for over 90% of the railways' 1960 traffic was carried on lines which remained open ten years later.{{sfn|Loft|2013|p=}}{{page needed|date=June 2023}}

Whatever the figures, towards the end of the 1960s it became increasingly clear that rail closures were not bringing the rail system out of deficit and were unlikely ever to do so.{{sfn|White|1986|p=}}{{page needed|date=June 2023}} Transport minister [[Barbara Castle]] decided that some rail services, which could not pay their way but had a valuable social role, should be subsidised. Legislation allowing this was introduced in the [[Transport Act 1968]]. Section 39 made provision for a subsidy to be paid by the Treasury for a three-year period. This was later repealed in the Railways Act 1974. Whether these subsidies affected the size of the network is questionable: the criteria for reprieving loss-making lines had not altered, merely the way their costs appeared in the railways accounts—previously their contribution to the railways' overall loss was hidden in the total deficit.{{sfn|Loft|2013|p=}}{{page needed|date=June 2023}}