Did Beeching Kill Your Town? Britain's Lost Railway Towns, 1955 to 2021

Between the 1950s and the mid 1970s Britain closed thousands of railway stations, most famously after Richard Beeching's report The Reshaping of British Railways (1963). Which towns lost their railway for good, and how do they compare today with similar towns that kept a station? I parse every entry in Wikipedia's lists of closed stations in Great Britain (6,907 entries), place 93% of them through Wikidata, OpenStreetMap and OS Open Names, and link them, with today's 2,609 National Rail stations, to the ONS built-up areas of 2022. 3,331 listed stations closed between 1955 and 1975, with a peak of 556 in 1964. Of 1,720 towns in England and Wales of 2,000 to 100,000 people that had a station in 1955, 643 (37%) lost every station by 1975 and still have none; the share falls from 50% for towns of 2,000 to 5,000 to 4% for towns of 50,000 to 100,000. Compared with kept towns of the same 2021 size and region, the lost towns have about £1,613 lower mean household income (3.1%), 1.3 percentage points fewer adults in managerial or professional work and 0.8 points fewer households without a car, with no clear difference in age, employment or long-term sickness. The income gap is concentrated within 15 km of cities. Because the closures targeted smaller, quieter places and the comparison holds 2021 size fixed, these are associations, not effects, and they cannot see any population the towns lost. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/beeching-cuts/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/beeching-cuts. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/beeching-cuts/.