Beeching is a most reviled name to Brit railfans
One ought to read more about what he actually set out to do before using his name as epithet.
Beeching was a conservative BTW, and his main purpose was to revise freight service- so as to save it- on BR. The rest was gravy.
BR followed up his plan, and theirs with some really bad mistakes, and a few good ideas such as unit trains to serve power plants.
UNfortunately the oooold mindsets were set deep : "merry go round" trains were made up of brand new low capacity 4 wheel wagons etc etc
It is the present fashion to write article such as 'How Beeching got it Wrong 50 Years Later"
which is crap- Beeching didn't get it wrong, just a few mistakes in his broad plan,
then BR screwed the rest.
BR's dieselization went poorly as well- reinventing the wheel . The Deltics were a stellar success among many dismal failures. The DMU is probably the shining success. Oh and did I say BR and all that were the product of the left?. Failure to fix BR was part of a long running austerity plan to save the pound to pay off crushing wartime [foreign] debt, and BR wasn't the only -well victim is way too strong a word. Citizens were short on food for several years after the war as well. Beeching is blamed for ending steam locomotion as well, but the reality involves the banning of coal smoke in the London area .
Now Bring on the old chestnuts, such as the Vanderbilt's sound bite 'The public be damned...' Who is familiar with what the rest of the sentence said?