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Railway Requiem nt Resurgence P

12th April 1963, Page 48
12th April 1963
Page 48
Page 49
Page 51
Page 48, 12th April 1963 — Railway Requiem nt Resurgence P
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

FRANK BURRAVOE POINTS OUT SOME ASPECTS OF THE BEECH ING REPORT THAT WILL INTEREST A GOOD MANY ROAD OPERATORS DR. BEECHING'S much-heralded report takes the shape long predicted by transport men, although multitudes of manhours must have been spent by a legion of executives of the railway army in gathering the massive crop of traffic figures from all over Great Britain, in sorting and sifting them, ready for delivering them on the doorstep of the Ministry of Transport.

The spade work has been prodigious. The first dig was in 1954, when the grand modernization plan was published. The next was in 1956, when the plan was reviewed. Then, in 1959, there was a re-appraisal. The White Papers which have been published from time to time, if they had not become yellowed with age, would have been sufficient to cover many of the cracks in the railway structure.

Statistical Steam

But road operators will not want to waste time on finding out why it was necessary to raise so many clouds of statistical steam. They will be concerned, of course, as every rightminded citizen and taxpayer is, with the wide social, economic and political problems which a heavily subsidized and retreating railway system presents; they may even feel the sort of sympathy that the young and energetic feel towards an elderly recipient of public assistance; but in their own interest and for the public good they will be anxious to see what they can do both to fill any gaps which the railways leave, to provide any necessary services for the communities which are to be abandoned and to build up their own businesses.

Much will depend on how the Beeching report is implemented. It is by no means certain that the Government will allow the railways to withdraw all the stations and services envisaged. In the past few years, of the scores of proposals for the abandonment of railway facilities which have been put before Transport Users' Consultative Committees by British Railways, very few indeed have failed to excite public challenge; and those proposals, it is well to remember, were on the whole in respect of stations and lines which were much nearer the bottom of the barometer of bankruptcy than those covered by the present report.

Much, too, will depend on the extent to which the railways themselves augment their own road vehicle fleets, or hand over traffic to B.R.S., as the railway network contracts. For the first time, much more may well be heard of that little noticed section 174(4) of the Road Traffic Act, 1960, which requires the regional Licensing Authorities to have regard "to the extent to which the vehicles to be authorized will further the provision of services under which goods will be carried partly by road and partly by railway or inland waterway without the need for unloading and reloading" and the further related proviso to the sub-section.

Many Amputations

Yet many amputations of lines are bound to be made. Even if in some instances the Government prefers; as a result of public pressure or otherwise, to administer a monetary transfusion instead of resorting to drastic surgery, there will still be opportunities for road hauliers and bus and coach operators to seize.

Coal and livestock are cases in point. Take coal first. Railway plans contemplate the closure of many coal sidings and their replacement by coal concentration centres or coal railheads, much more mechanized, both for bagging and in other ways, than the existing coal sidings. From these new centres, fed by block trains from selected pits, coal will be taken by road either direct to users or to coal merchants' yards. Experiments in this direction have been going on in Middlesex. As these concentration schemes develop, particularly in South B30 Wales, Lancashire, the Midlands and around Glasgow, the need for additional road vehicles, both tippers for bulk supplies and flats for bagged fuel, will soon make itself felt. How many of these extra vehicles will be railway, B.R.S., Coal Board or independently owned remains to be seen. But if the Coal Merchants' Federation and the Road Haulage Association are up early enough in the morning and forage closely together, they ought to be able to secure much of this traffic for their flocks.

After all, they are in a powerful position. They can offer good service at attractive prices, they are in close local touch with the large-scale coal factors and they can advance strong arguments for the licensing of additional Aor B-licence vehicles or make the necessary arrangements for taking out contract A licences.

Livestock As to livestock, the railways were beginning to abandon ship before Commodore Beeching sent his present distress signals to the Minister of Transport. As recently as January last, transport of livestock was discontinued from no less than 2,260 railway stations. Although those stations would no doubt be carefully chosen to ensure that the discontinuance did as little damage as possible to railway carryings, more livestock traffic must have been lost. Traffic between farms was already firmly in the hands of either road transport livestock specialists or those many two-headed opportunists, the farmer hauliers who have either B licences with appropriate conditions or C licences under which they can carry for hire or reward any distance for neighbouring farmers. Traffic from farms to cattle markets and vice versa, particularly over short and medium distances, was also being increasingly carried by road.

The change from rail to road for journeys of these kinds can now be expected to be accelerated and road operators ought to have their feet ready to press the right pedal. Such livestock traffic as the railways carry to abattoirs will probably be for the most part retained if the abattoirs are located to tit in with rail concentrations. The same applies to the conveyance of horses to race meetings and between training establishments.

Parcels Traffic

Parcels traffic will undoubtedly be affected as branch lines progressively close. This class of traffic presents problems of its own. A comprehensive system for collection and delivery on a nation-wide. scale requires a formidable Organization representing a great deal more than the ownership of a fleet of vehicles. The vast Post Office parcel post system and its possible co-ordination with the railway parcels service has to be taken into account in assessing changes and opportunities. Only a week or two ago the Postmaster-General gave a noncommittal reply when he was asked in Parliament to report on any discussions he has had with the British Transport Commission on the probable adverse effects On postal services of railway contraction. But we know (a) that as recently as February 18 the maximum weight for postal parcels was increased from 15 to 22 lb., (b) that a special Post Office Committee is studying problems arising from the railway plans, (c) that parcel post charges are going up, (d) that when charges were increased in 1961 traffic declined and the deficit on the service rose, and (e) that the East Anglian experiment with a road parcel post service will, if successful, be applied more extensively over the country.

Those big concerns like Woolworths, who as a matter of policy insist on all their multifarious parcels traffic being given to rail, may well remain faithful to their wedding vows, since the railways' national network of collection and delivery will presumably be maintained, although the rail element is reduced or cut out entirely. Many other customers, however, may be more inclined to flirt with road transport, especially for urgent packages, if, as may well be the case, railway concentration means that transit times to and from the remoter .places are lengthened. Manufacturing and commercial concerns which pay relatively high charges for the conveyance of parcels by passenger train will require little persuasion to link arms with road operators, if the standard of service given by the railways deteriorates elsewhere as it improves on a number of trunk lines. The road operators who should then benefit are those, including B.R.S., who provide a comprehensive network for parcels. Those parcels carriers who specialize on one or more trunk routes, such as London-Birmingham, NottinghamManchester and Newcastle-Glasgow, may not benefit; they may indeed find competition with rail more intense. On the other hand, new regular road trunk services may be opened up between smaller places which, in the past, while a rail service was provided, could scarcely support both rail and road—to North Scotland, mid-Wales and North Cornwall, for instance.

Refrigerated Transport

Low temperature transport. In the 10 years from 1950, highly insulated vehicles for the conveyance of frozen food and ice cream are estimated to have increased from about 1,500 to 5,000 (Aand C-licensed). The railways, by taking energetic steps to meet the exacting requirements of firms which need this kind of transport, have shared substantially in the traffic, and will no doubt make every effort not only to retain what they already enjoy, but to increase their proportion. As considerable further increases in low temperature transport can be confidently predicted, the role of road operators, whether as contractors to the railways or as throughout carriers for the customers, should be a leading one. Railways have some advantage in that most of the firms requiring this transport are of such a size as to warrant the installation of private rail sidings. Nevertheless, the railways' ability to compete with road operators is scarcely likely to be improved by closures. They will have either to buy additional road vehicles themselves or to charter some. Buying may be less economic than chartering.

The picture in regard to tankers, whether for edible or nonedible oils or chemicals, is much the same as for insulated vehicles.

General Merchandise It is with general merchandise, however, that the big question mark arises. The proposed Liner trains, consisting of permanently coupled flat wagons carrying large containers, running to a time-table between major centres, initially between London and Liverpool and London and Sheffield via Birmingham, are to be the powerful magnets which will attract over 29 million tons or more of this sundries traffic to rail each year. If this part of the plan works with the clockwork precision, speed and efficiency and at the cost envisaged, it will certainly abstract much traffic from road. But paper plans often get blown about, and the wind which threatens this one will come from the loading and unloading of the containers and the handling (affecting packing and breakages) during the collection and delivery of the goods. Manufacturers are less interested in the time-tabled movements of a freight train than in the time of collection and delivery and the condition of their goods. Speedy time-tabled freight trains are not new. Containers are not, either. Yet neither quick trains nor containers have in the past been able to match door-to-door road transport, even with much long distance traffic.

One final word about haulage. It will be surprising if British Railways continue to cast their net of objections to A and B licence applications as widely as they have done hitherto. They will oppose perhaps even more strenuously than in the past those which concern trunk traffic, but they will have less cause to incur the expense and odium of objecting to many others.

Road Passenger Services

Now what about providers of road passenger services? In general they should do well, whether they operate stage, express or excursion services, but it would be a mistake to imagine that they will welcome all the traffic which the railways want to discard. On some of the provincial urban lines which it is proposed to abandon, peak-hour commuter traffic is quite heavy--far too heavy for bus operators, company and municipal, to cope with on existing fleets. Already many of those operators complain that too much capital is locked up in idle vehicles for most of the day. To say that they will be reluctant to increase their fleets for this sort of traffic is to put it mildly. Again, the facile assumption that a score or so of passengers cannot be carried economically on a train but are tailor-made for buses may be false. If the passengers all want to travel at the same non-peak time and can be .accommodated on an existing bus, and if no substantial route detour is necessary to pick them up, well and good. But if they want to travel at different times, or during peak hours, or live miles from the existing bus route (or many are children paying only half fare), they will be unwanted unless they bring hefty subsidies with them.

Questionable Cure

Problems of this sort have already arisen in some cases of abandoned branch lines: and railway subsidies to the bus operator are a questionable cure, as some transport undertakings have discovered.

Still, there is a reverse side to the medal. For instance, the proposed elimination of extra trains during he summer holiday period and on public holidays will give the express and excursion operators plenty to do. Whether those operators will expect and obtain a further slice of railway traffic at nonholiday times to keep their vehicles and drivers employed is another question.

Altogether, then, we can expect transport to be in a turmoil for many years to come, whichever party is in power. The 2,000 public inquiries with which Transport Users' Consultative Committees are faced, and the consultations which the Railways Board is to have with such bodies as the R.H.A., the T.R.T.A., the Coal Board, the Post Office, B.R.S. and the company and municipal road passenger transport interests, not to mention the trade unions, will keep the pot boiling furiously.


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