On 26 January the Conservatives said a government consultation document had been launched to create guidance on the process for closing down railway lines. The move followed rumours that the Government was planning to cut smaller railways, after subsidy to rural railways was cut by a third in November 2004, said a Conservative Party news release.

Shadow Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said: "The consultation gives added weight to suspicions that the Government is planning to close down parts of the rail network. If they have no intention of closing smaller and particularly rural railway lines, why are they consulting on how to go about doing it?"

Transport Secretary Alistair Darling, in a written statement, said: "Changes to service provision will be necessary to reflect passenger and freight demand."

He added the guidance would be put on a statutory basis for the first time and would be more transparent than the current process, which will be obsolete later in the year due to changes in the organisation of the railways.

Now rail industry journalist Christian Wolmar, writing in The Independent on Sunday, says ministers are preparing ways of closing or "mothballing" large sections of the railway network according to the document ?which was slipped out without publicity last week.?

Wolmar says that dozens of branch lines and secondary routes could shut, in what would be the biggest rethink of the network since the Beeching report in the 1960s, which led to the closure of 4,000 miles of railway and nearly half the nation's stations. Loss-making services would be transferred on to buses, as a means of reducing the £6bn-a-year subsidy.

The 83-page consultation paper uses a new kind of cost-benefit analysis (CBA), reports Wolmar, and experts say this CBA will highlight the economically fragile state of the network. Such analysis often penalises trains because it fails to take into account that they are environmentally friendly.

Wolmar cites a range of lines potentially under threat, including the lines to the seaside resorts of Whitby in North Yorkshire, St Ives and Newquay in Cornwall, Sheringham in north Norfolk and Skegness in Lincolnshire. But some urban lines, such as Huddersfield to Sheffield and Walsall to Wolverhampton, could go too.

Roger Ford, technical editor of Modern Railways, told The Independent on Sunday that cutting branch lines might not be enough. "If they want to save serious money they would have to cut many regional services and possibly whole swaths of lines."

Procedures for simplifying rail service closures were included in last year?s Railways Act, which was rushed through with little publicity just before the general election.

Under these powers, the Department for Transport has already given approval to Arriva Trains Wales? plans to withdraw its services between Manchester and Cornwall, via Crewe, Hereford and the Severn Tunnel.