In the gloomy British Railways headquarters on London's Marylebone Road, a room has been kept carefully locked for months, with its key entrusted to only one man. The room's treasure: the data for a top-secret report on Britain's rail system prepared by burly, brusque Dr. Richard Beeching, 49, who resigned two years ago as technical director of Imperial Chemical Industries to become the nation's rail-car czar and the highest-paid civil servant ($67,000 a year) in British history. Last week the report was finally made public, and Beeching's thoroughgoing case for a historic revamping of Britain's railway system proved so...
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