Forty Years Ago

[Pacific231G]

Quite by chance I've just picked up this from the Labour Party manifesto of October 1974.

 

"The energy crisis has underlined our objectives to move as much traffic as possible from road to rail and to water; and to develop public transport to make us less dependent upon the private car."

 

Whatever happened to that idea?

 

In Britain at that time "water" meant coastal shipping rather than the purely inland canal network and small ports, some of them quite a way inland such as Gloucester were still quite heavily used for a fairly wide range of mostly bulk cargo. Most large towns and cities had a goods yard and though it was beginning to struggle BR did have a fairly extensive wagonload network . Even in the early 1980s we were using Red Star parcels to move some of our newsfilm into Southampton for same day transmission from towns like Bournemouth, Reading and Portsmouth and I don't think BR ever let us down. 

 

I'm also just reading that yet more line closures seem to be in the offing in France. I suppose therefore that the real question is how much in the long term railways, with their massively more efficient energy use and inherent controlability and safety, can compete with the flexibility,  but at a high price, of road transport?  How much more of the ground that railways lost between the 1950s and 1990s can ever be regained?

 

 

 

[Catkins]

In the short term, I think that rail will continue to handle the bulk flows such as maritime containers, imported fuels and oils. The passenger side will continue to grow on the business and commuting market, but I feel that the pure leisure market will contract for as long as ticket prices are perceived to be high.

 

In the longer term, once the UK has settled on it's energy generation policy, I suspect that electrification will be the main power source, and more local towns will be reconnected to rail. However I do not foresee it happening in my life time.