40 passengers were carried between and , although the train had been standing room only as far as Leeds. Local services fared little better, as motor transport made inroads from the 1920s onwards, resulting in the successive closures to passenger traffic of the Waverley Route's branch lines: Lauder on 12 September 1932, Dolphinton on 1 April 1933, Duns to Earlston and Jedburgh on 12 August 1948, Duns and Selkirk on 10 September 1951, Hexham on 15 October 1956 and Peebles and Eyemouth on 5 February 1962. In terms of goods traffic, After railway nationalisation in 1948, the need for two lines between Edinburgh and Carlisle was inevitably questioned. The Caledonian's main line provided a faster connection, and could be operated as a branch off the West Coast line. With passenger receipts inconsequential, the line relied on its goods traffic: coal was brought in and out of the Tweed town mills and Cheviot wool brought from local farms. Once new road transport techniques allowed farmers to move their sheep to market in one move and merchants to shift coal from pit to boilerhouse without using the railway, an impending sense of doom could be felt for the line. Proposal tabled In March 1963, the British Railways Board published Richard Beeching's report on the Reshaping of British Railways. The 148-page document proposed the withdrawal of passenger services from considered as unremunerative, and the closure of over 2,000 stations. Among the lines whose passenger service would be affected was the Waverley Route. The document had a map which showed that the section between Hawick and Carlisle fell into the lowest category of unremunerative line, with a weekly patronage of less than 5,000 passengers. The Hawick-Edinburgh stretch fared little better, with between 5,000 and 10,000 passengers a week. At the time, the Waverley Route was running at an estimated annual loss of £113,000, with an average operating cost per train mile for diesel-hauled freights of 12.390 shillings, one of the worst in Scotland. For British Railways, the line was seen as a high-cost alternative to the West Coast Main Line, and its retention could not be justified by its dwindling freight traffic which could be diverted to the West Coast. As a result, as from the publication of the report, the Scottish Region and the London Midland Regions of British Railways, which had responsibility for the section south of Longtown, both assumed that the