Another part view of the booking hall and the various display cabinets and boards promoting local companies. The LMS blackboard is still being used, despite it being several years since nationalisation and the establishment of British Railways, to advertise the cost of fares to local stations. What is of interest are the stations listed which no longer exist demonstrating the number of local areas served by the railways in the pre-Beeching era, the BR Chairman brought in by the Conservative 'road minded' government in the early 1960s to rationalise the country's network. The report was a reaction to significant losses which had begun in the 1950s as the expansion in road transport began to attract passengers and goods from the railways; losses which continued to bedevil British Railways despite the introduction of the railway modernisation plan of 1955. Beeching proposed that only drastic action would save the railways from increasing losses in the future. However, successive governments were more keen on cost-saving rather than elements of the report requiring investment. More than 4,000 miles of railway and 3,000 stations closed in the decade following the report, a reduction of 25 per cent of route miles and 50 per cent of stations. To this day in railway circles and among older people, particularly in parts of the country that suffered most from cuts, Beeching's name is still synonymous with mass closure of railways and loss of many local services.
The Board reads as follows:
The fares are given in shillings and pence. One pound was equivalent to 20 shillings with a shilling further divided by twelve pennies. A quick way of calculating the value to modern (metric) currency values is to express the value as only pennies and divide by 2.4 as one pound was equal to 240 old pennies. So 2/9 means two shillings and nine pence (2 x 12 + 9 = 33 old pennies ÷ 2.4) which is the equivalent of 13.75 new (metric) pence.