Lord Andrew Adonis said that Britain needed to reverse Beeching’s cuts to the rail network

Billions of pounds earmarked for road-building schemes should be diverted to reopen almost 100 railway stations that were shut as part of the Beeching cuts, ministers are to be told.

Lord Adonis, the former head of the government’s National Infrastructure Commission, will today call for a national programme to “reverse Beeching” and reinstate hundreds of miles of passenger lines closed during the 1960s and 1970s.

Richard Beeching, the former chairman of British Railways, advocated the closure of huge swathes of the network deemed to be loss-making, including more than 2,300 stations, in 1963.

In a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research, Lord Adonis will say that the systemic reopening of mothballed lines is needed to reinvigorate towns and villages across the country and