Part of the line that the Riccarton Junction village was on has reopened recently as the Borders Railway, which goes from Edinburgh as far south as Tweedbank. Seems quite popular too, inasmuch as there were complaints about overcrowding. The post war era saw a good deal of decline of the railways independently of Beeching - there were more closures prior to his report than after. With the rise of car travel and failure of investment through the war years and thereafter, as well as rising wages, it became increasingly difficult to keep it going. Rather than a pattern of random failures, the Beeching model demonstrated how you could prune the network systematically so that there was a skeleton left that covered the UK and could be viable. It wouldn't run at a profit, but the subsidy would be politically acceptable. As numbers of passengers and freight volumes went down even further there was the Serpell report which outlined even further track losses. One option was no railway to the southwest of Bristol, for example. However, since the 1980s rail travel has become popular again and usage has more than doubled, whether you count passenger kilometers travelled, passenger journeys, footfall through stations or any other measure. So when I travel by train and there isn't anywhere to sit down, I know why!
