The railway's huge deficit and the reputation earned during the Modernisation Plan fiasco for bad financial planning led the government to take firm action. In 1962, the Transport Minister Ernest Marples appointed Richard Beeching as head of British Railways with a brief to cut the spiralling losses. Beeching was a businessman rather than a railwayman and his high salary (particularly in a nationalised industry) caused controversy. His report "The Reshaping of British Railways" (commonly known simply as "The Beeching Report") issued in 1963, concluded that much of the railway network carried little traffic and should be closed down. His report proposed a massive closures programme which would involve 5,000 miles of track, and 2,363 small stations being closed, which came to be known as the Beeching axe. The report also proposed that British Rail electrify some major main lines and adopt containerised freight traffic instead of outdated and uneconomic wagon-load traffic. The closures recommended by the report were mostly implemented. They peaked in the mid-1960s and continued until the early 1970s. By 1975, the system had shrunk to 12,000 miles (19,000 km) of track and 2,000 stations. In the event, the closures failed to produce the hoped for savings, or to restore the railways to profitability.