On a historical note, many miles of small railway branch lines were closed down and torn up in the 1960s. In some rural areas you can still see where the line used to run, and in fact there are sometimes designated footpaths which follow the old right-of-way and are popular with hikers.
Yes, it was very sad and very short-sighted. It would be wrong to pin all the blame on Beeching, though - his rail closures were a compromise with his superior, a former used car dealer named Ernest Marples who wanted to shut down the rail network altogether and use the land for road-building. He wanted Britain's motorway network to replace the railways, not supplement them.
I have a historical rail atlas of the UK which I picked up for 25p in a second-hand bookshop. It shows still-open rail lines in red and closed lines in black. Needless to say, central London had very few black lines, whereas more peripheral areas such as South Wales were full of them.
