Modernisation and the Closure of the Varsity Line, 1964-1974

这项研究将评估对当代政治和intellectualcultures的经济和社会转型的压力迫使政府削减英国的铁路Varsity线的长期关闭。使用的资源将是，一方面，政府和英国铁路文件合理化的需要关闭，对当地的反对意见，其中包含一个对立的现代化，以紧缩的愿景。地方当局的人口增长和经济扩张计划将揭示出一种日益增长的现代主义文化，这种文化重视社会、经济和精神上的关注，而面对个人主义的消费者驱动的汽车和道路建设文化，政府的投资越来越多。个人自由的对立观点将铁路视为一种过时的技术，而不是一种能够防止拥堵和环境恶化的社会运输系统，因此，这将成为关于富裕、衰落和现代化的辩论的信息。它还将评估英国对这一时期的政治和知识感知在多大程度上不同于欧洲和美国的相同动态。围绕着史学界认为是比钦时代最有争议和错误的封闭之一的公共话语，将为最近的学术研究提供证据，将铁路置于衰落的文化中，而不是运输政策的狭隘问题。

This research will evaluate the protracted closure of the Varsity Line against contemporary political and intellectualcultures as the pressure of economic and social transformation forced government retrenchment of Britain's railways.The sources used will be, on the one hand, government and British Rail papers rationalising the need for closures,against local objections, which contain an opposing vision of modernisation to retrenchment. Local authority plans forpopulation increase and economic expansion will reveal a growing modernist culture that valued social, economic andenvironmental concerns in the face of the individualist consumer-driven culture of the car and road building which thegovernment invested in increasingly. The opposing views of individual liberty framing the railways as a bygonetechnology versus a social transport system capable of preventing congestion and environmental decay, will thus informthe debates over affluence, decline and modernisation. It will also evaluate the extent to which Britain's political andintellectual perception of this period was distinct from or shaped by the same dynamics in Europe and the US. The publicdiscourse surrounding what the historiography identifies as one of the most controversial and mistaken closures of theBeeching era, will provide evidence for the very recent scholarship placing the railways within the culture of declinerather than a narrow issue of transport policy.