Did the rail closure programme force more people onto the roads, or was the process of migration happening anyway? The diaries reported the transport minister's fetish for being whipped while dressed in women's clothing, as described in great detail by one of the prostitutes who had provided these services to Marples, and confirmed at the time by her detailed knowledge of the interior of Marples' home where the events took place. People who had voted Labour in the hope of stopping the railway closure programme were soon disappointed. You simply cant dismiss as a conspiracy theory the fact the Marples made his fortune as a road builder and his family still had significant share holdings in Marples Ridgeway.

However in the late 80s with the rail union’s neutered, British Rail operated with the lowest subsidy per passenger mile of any national railway system in the 1st world. However, Marsh blotted his copybook with Harold Wilson, by helping defeat ‘In Place of Strife’, Barbara Castle’s proposed reform of the Trade Unions, and Marsh was fired from the Cabinet in October 1969 to be replaced by Fred Mulley. The country was broke again and officials in the Ministry of Transport managed to convince the new Government to carry on with business as usual.The political consensus appears to have been a resounding ‘no’, and Britain’s fast road network became like the National Health Service, free at the point of use. Beeching's report listed the 5000 miles of lines and related stations to be closed in Appendix 2 of the report. It was six years before he finally agreed to let it go – and nothing had been done to it in all that time. In 1945, a delegation from the British Road Federation and the Society of Motor Manufacturers visited Germany to inspect the autobahn system.

It would make the design of these roads far too complicated to build ‘cycle tracks’ into them … It would be very expensive, and probably impracticable, to build a completely separate system of tracks for cyclists. Marples, Ridgway and Partners was a Westminster-based civil engineering contractor founded, and majority-owned, by Marples, who was transport minister from 1959 to 1964.

Ernest Marples’ tenure as Minister of Transport was a time when the British car transformed from functional but boring mechanical stodge to genuinely world-class and desirable models. This book gives quite a lot of Marples’ personal story but also goes into quite some depth on the background of the railways at this time.

Also this conspiracy theory argues that by closing rail lines, Marples and Beeching were bullying and bludgeoning a gullible population onto the roads, when the evidence was that they were doing so of their own free will.Beeching’s appointment and Marples’ penchant for road building would be controversial enough, but questionable business practices and his later abscondment to Monaco to evade a hefty tax bill did little to rescue his reputation. This file is NOT necessarily in the public domain in the United States because a non-simple image can only be in the public domain in the U. In 1951, Winston Churchill appointed him a junior minister in the Conservative Government 1951–1955.