Michael Williams: We knew Beeching was wrong, even in 1963

There are few things more evocative of the British landscape than the country branch line. A little engine chuffs along a single track, a few wisps of steam drifting across the fields, the sun glinting off its copper-capped chimney. There might be a couple of elderly carriages and even a milk tank or a cattle truck in tow. Nobody much comes or goes on the immaculately tended platforms. Somehow here, it always seems to be summer.

At least, that's how we like to imagine it. Of course, the railways haven't been like this since Dr Richard Beeching, Britain's most hated civil servant, came along with his axe in 1963 and shut down 5,000 miles of branch lines. Now, it seems, the Evil Doctor is to get his comeuppance. Privatised train companies say they want to reopen at least 14 branch lines closed down 40 years ago.

In 1963, the comic songwriting duo Michael Flanders and Donald Swann caught the nation's mood with a lament on the Beeching cuts. "No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat, at Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street," they sang. "No one departs and no one arrives, from Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives. They've all passed out of our lives..."

But now, it appears, not entirely. The hard-headed corporate train operators of modern Britain are not, of course, inspired by altruism or nostalgia. They claim the growing popularity of the railways, with passenger numbers up by a half since privatisation, justifies the "business case" for reopening.

But it was ludicrous to believe there was ever a case for closing many of these lines in the first place. How on earth did we allow the closure of the "Varsity Line" from Oxford to Cambridge, forcing passengers to travel on a roundabout route across London, while at the same time planning the construction of the M25? Or to shut down the old Great Central line from London to the north of England? This was the newest railway in the land, as well as the most expensively engineered, and designed to take European-sized trains to a Channel Tunnel.

In allowing Beeching's closures back in the 1960s, we also failed to see that local railways are more than a way of getting from A to B. "The country railway," wrote the historian David St John Thomas, "was always part of the district it served, with its own natural history, its own legends and folklore, a staff who were at the heart of village affairs, its stations and adjoining pubs: places for exchange of gossip, news and advice."

We may never be able entirely to revive these ghosts, since the proposed reopenings would be funded by "property development". But how nice, once again, to be able to buy a through ticket on the branch line to Bramley and Wonersh, Slinfold or Burn Naze Halt.

On The Slow Train: Railway Journeys Into Hidden Britain by Michael Williams will be published by Random House in May