There is a handsome tiled map half hidden at Victoria Station which gives details of the old London, Brighton and South Coast Railway services at their peak.

It was a highly impressive network.

Hardly anywhere was more then five miles from a station and even little villages, such as Barcombe and Southwater, had their own services.

This network was already starting to fade in the Fifties and Sixties as car ownership increased but its death knell was sounded by Dr Richard Beeching.

Beeching was brought in by the Tory Government from ICI to modernise the railways which had never really recovered from being neglected during the Second World War.

They were in a shambolic state and costing huge sums of money to maintain. The stock was antiquated and there was gross overstaffing.

His solution was to get rid of nearly all branch lines on the grounds they were loss-making and incapable of improvement.

The railways were to concentrate on a core network of inter-city services with commuter routes to and from hubs such as London.

Despite its so-called commitment to an integrated transport policy, the incoming Labour Government actually carried out most of the closures in the years between 1964 and 1970.

A few lines were saved and this prompted Beeching to give up his post as head of British Rail to return to private industry.

He lived at East Grinstead and showed no favouritism to the town by axing his own branch line heading southward to Sheffield Park.

Most of it has since been restored as the Bluebell Railway, one of the earliest and best private lines in Britain.

No one should blame Beeching entirely for wrecking the railways. His inter-city concept has stood the test of time. But the criteria he used to close the branch lines were harsh and it is clear in restrospect many of them should have been saved.

It was blatantly stupid to close the Lewes to Uckfield line, seven short miles in a stretch which would have provided another link to London.

There are still plans to restore it but they never come to anything and Uckfield is stuck with one of the worst train services in Britain.

Even more appalling was the decision to shut the Steyning line between Shoreham and Horsham. This was still being well used and the closure was strongly opposed but to no avail.

Besides being a useful line in its own right, it would also have been a far better alternative route to London than the Lewes-Uckfield link. Sadly, housing built on more than one section makes it impossible to restore.

Had these lines in Sussex managed to survive, they would nearly all be flourishing today. Big increases in population in villages and towns such as Henfield, Crowborough and Uckfield would have made them viable as commuter routes with a lot of leisure traffic, too, as people enjoyed seeing the leafy countryside by train.

Diesel would have replaced steam and some lines would have been electrified. The vast overstaffing could have been stopped, leading smaller but more frequent trains providing a fast and efficient service.

Successive governments, including this one, have never shown a real commitment to public transport. Yet the cost of reopening lines like the link from Lewes to Uckfield is tiny compared with new roads such as bypasses and the benefit is immense.

Forty years on, some of the damage done by Beeching could still be rectified.