A century after being built, however, the line was falling on tough times. The infamous Beeching cuts of the 1960s – an effort from the chair of the now-defunct British Rail, Richard Beeching, to streamline the rail network by shutting thousands of stations – saw almost all the stops along the line closed. By the 1980s, with the track being used by just a handful of freight and passenger trains and some of the infrastructure decaying, British Rail proposed mothballing the Settle-Carlisle for good. This didn"t go down well with the locals.