. . . but NUR still won't lift terminals ban
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BY A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT TN secret session on Tuesday at its Ply mouth conference the National Union of Railwaymen again flatly refused to permit liner-train terminals to be opened to private hauliers. By a vote of 46 to 30, delegates decided to maintain their ban. It had been expected that the explanations about transport integration with which the Minister of Transport had persuaded the union's executive to take a more liberal view of terminal access would be endorsed by the delegates, but this proved optimistic.
Lord Beeching's view that liner-trains could be operated economically only if private enterprise hauliers' traffic was freely accepted has always been endorsed by his successor, Mr. Stanley Raymond, and the Government has repeatedly pressed this view upon the NUR.
Whether or not British Railways is coming around to modifying this attitude is
open to doubt, but the battle between hauliers and the railways over a liner-train traffic application in Manchester this month (COMMERCIAL MOTOR, July 8) suggests that the BR/BRS/RHA tripartite pact on joint working is becoming a thing of the past. Meanwhile, Mrs. Castle's plans for a national grouping of the State transport undertakings in her new NFA organization are under pressure from another source: the road transport unions have made it clear that if boosting the railways means redundancy or limitation of earnings in road transport there will not be ready cooperation from them.
Speaking to the NUR conference on Wednesday, Mrs. Castle described the union's decision as "very shortsighted"; it was not a matter of ideological importance but one of common sense.