No Agreement Yet on Liner Depots
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FROM OUR INDUSTRIAL CORRESPONDENT RITISH RAILWAYS chairman, Dr.
Beeching, and Mr. Sidney Greene, general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, spent three hours last week discussing the union's objections to private hauliers using the proposed new Liner Train depots. Although a brief, formal statement issued after the meeting declared that "some progress " • had been made, it was clear that the two sides had failed to reach agreement. Further meetings will, however, be held when both sides have had time to digest what was said.
Most of the time at the meeting appears to have been spent by Dr. Beeching in trying to convince the union team that unless the depots are thrown open to haulage contractors, the railways' hopes of attracting a major part of the 30m. tons of freight at present carried by private hauliers over distances of 100 miles or more will have to be drastically revised downwards. In that case the whole £1.00m. Liner Train project would have to be substantially scaled down or abandoned altogether.
Dr. Beeching was able to give the union some assurances about redundancies among the railway cartage staff. The fear of wholesale redundancies is the chief reason why the union wants to keep out the private hauliers. But according to railway experts the entry of private hauliers will do little or nothing to make these jobs more precarious. It might even help.
Besides, the incidence of redundancy can be limited by making full use of natural wastage and controlled recruitment. As it happens a large proportion of cartage staff are elderly and due to retire during the next few years.
A sign that Dr. Beeching is confident that he will ultimately get union agreement to his plans is that the ordering of equipment for the first £15m. stage of the plan is going ahead, so thus as long as union co-operation is agreed by then, the first services can be started at the end of this year or early next. But railway officials are careful to point out that the equipment—the special flat wagons and lifting gear, for instance—would not be wasted even if the Liner Train project never got off the ground.
Next month the N.U.R. will be holding its annual conference and it may well be that we shall have to wait for this to be out of the way before any more progress can be made.