When Dr Richard Beeching wielded his axe over Britain’s railway network, cutting 4,000 miles of track, he was criticised for his brutality but he was clear in his justification.

It was the age of the private car. Too few people wanted to travel by train any more.

Now he’s been proved wrong once and for all. A stretch of the old Carlisle to Edinburgh Waverley line, between Edinburgh and Tweedbank, re-opened in September – and within a month almost 126,000 people had travelled on it.

Operators Scotrail have even had to lay on extra carriages to cope with the enormous demand.

The success of the re-opened rail line was cited by the Conservative-leaning think tank the Bow Group in a report they published this week.

It calls on the Government to drop expensive schemes for new lines such as High Speed 2, and put the money towards re-establishing some of the rail links that Dr
Beeching axed instead – providing better links between towns and rural areas, for jobs and tourism.

Could Cumbria benefit from this? David Parker, the leader of Scottish Borders Council, helped in the fight to re-open part of the Waverley line. He’s clear that it’s not over yet.

“The closure of the Waverley line in 1969 was the worst injustice of all of the Beeching cuts, and was very quickly recognised as a decision that was flawed,” he says.

“Nearly half a century later, the opening of the Borders Railway is a triumph of a community working together to ensure that a dream could become a reality, and that a railway could once again return to the Borders.

“But only part of the job has been done. Tweedbank was always the starting point of reinstating the
railway to Carlisle. The campaign to go to Hawick and on to Carlisle must be reinvigorated.

“The minute the first passenger train leaves Tweedbank to Carlisle then it will once again become the Waverley line and that is what we all now need to fight for.”

A fight to open another of Cumbria’s axed railway lines has long been waged by Cedric Martindale, director of CKP Railways,

The success of the Edinburgh to Tweedbank train and the Bow Group report are encouraging him in his battle to get the Keswick to Penrith line opened again.

And he now declares: “It’s an idea whose time has come.”

Mr Martindale explains: “There are a lot of advantages. The obvious one is for tourism. Once the car parks in Keswick are full, nobody else can get into the town, so the businesses can’t work at their full capacity.

“Someone who doesn’t drive or chooses not to have a car would be able to get around without needing one. Anyone can use a train.”

And he adds: “There are several other lines, not just in Cumbria but in the whole country. Re-opening the Waverley line at the south end would make a lot of sense. It would mean extra capacity between England and Scotland for passengers as well as freight.

“The current budget for High Speed 2 could fund a thousand projects like this. The same amount of money could do a lot of good all over the country. Every region would benefit – not just a few select places up the middle.”

But will people be willing to get out of their cars? Experience elsewhere shows that they would.

“The Windermere line, to Staveley, Kendal and Oxenholme, gets 400,000 passengers in a year,”says Mr Martindale.

“Anything over a quarter of a million is good, and we are very confident of getting that.”

His hope is that the line could be extended west to Workington and east to Appleby.

“Building a nice railway line is much easier than building a big road,” he says. “And we’ve got modern technology to do it – not just wheelbarrows and shovels.”

He also believes the environmental benefits could be immense. “Just having the line to Keswick re-opened would save half a million gallons of fuel a year. Repeat that across the country and it would amount to enormous savings.”

Richard Utting, a board member of Penrith Community Partnership, is also strongly in favour of opening the line to Keswick. But he sees it only as a first step. The second, he says, should be to extend it as far as Workington and Whitehaven – and create better links between Penrith and west Cumbria, especially as industry grows there.

“Eden Council wants to take advantage of everything that’s happening on the west coast,” Mr Utting says. “But it hasn’t included rail in its transport plan.”

Studies suggest reinstating the line between Penrith and Keswick could cost between £60m on £100m, and he adds: “I don’t know how many billions they are spending on HS2, but this is peanuts by comparison. Upgrading the road to a dual carriageway would cost two to three times as much. So it’s the cheaper option as well.

“We feel now is the time to start driving this.”

Mr Martindale reckons private investors will back the scheme if they think politicians will.

“They want to see a political certainty that this would happen. It means the politicians saying: ‘This is a good idea. We support it.’”

Environmentalist Jill Perry agrees that it comes down to political will.

“When we get a forward-thinking government that really cares about carbon emissions then the Keswick to Penrith line could be re-opened,” she predicts.

What about the prospects of extending it further west? Mrs Perry lives near Maryport and says: “I can just remember when the line went to Cockermouth. My mother took me on it just before it closed.

“But it would be really hard to open that stretch to Cockermouth again because they’ve built the A66 over it, ironically. I don’t think that’s a goer at the moment. But I would love to see it happen in the future.”

And she’s confident re-opened lines would attract enough passengers to make them viable.

“People love the railway. Look what has happened when they re-opened the Waverley line from Edinburgh to Tweedbank.

“It’s a fantastic way to travel. People love these tourist routes and Keswick to Penrith would be really popular.”

However, Suzanne Caldwell, deputy chief executive of Cumbria Chamber of Commerce, is more guarded. She points out that money is finite, and spending it on one part of the railway system would, inevitably, mean cutting it elsewhere.

“Re-opening a railway line with the standard of service we would want is tremendously expensive,” Mrs Caldwell warns. “What effect would that have on our existing services? We have to make sure that investment is focused where it has the greatest impact.

“It would be very questionable to divert investment from the lines we already have in order to put a train through to Keswick.”

She accepts that the re-opened stretch of the Waverley line has proved successful. But Edinburgh is not Penrith – and what works there won’t necessarily work here.

Yet Mr Utting is undaunted, and feels sure that when more rail lines are running more people will use them.

“It’s true we are wedded to our cars,” he says. “But parking is an issue, congestion is an issue, the environment is an issue – and these are issues that aren’t going to go away.

“I think the argument for it is getting stronger all the time. To me it’s a no-brainer.”