Healthy Competition, But
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THERE should always be room for 1 healthy competition between road and rail, but railway transport, being a public service, should be the handmaiden of industry and the travelling public.
Some extension of the control of transport was, however, inevitable to direct certain classes of heavy mineral traffic back on to rail, but generally a transport user should not bc compelled to employ a particular form of transport against his will or to his disadvantage.
These were opinions expressed by Mr. W H. B. Cotton, A.M.I.C.E., F.Inst.H.E., Durham County Engineer and Surveyor, and Mr. C. E. R. Sherrington, 0.B.E., MC., M.A.(Cantab.), Minst.T., of the British Transport Commission, when covering the road and rail aspects of transport in a paper, "Economic Efficiency of Transport by Road and Railway." It was read yesterday.
£1,400m. Needed There 'had been a lack of appreciation of the inadequacy of the existing road system, -and with each year that passed the position was becoming relatively worse. An immense task lay ahead of those responsible for modernizing the road system, and at least £1,400m. would be required for capital expenditure in England and Wales, excluding London, during the next 10 or 20 years, according to how seriously the problem was tackled.
The Ministry of Transport had recently agreed that the traffic census figures in August, 1954, should be increased by 75 per cent, to allow for traffic increase in future road design, but there were responsible bodies who considered this too low an assessment, and 10m. vehicles by 1964 appeared to be well within the bounds of possibility.
The proposed lifting of the speed limit on heavy goods vehicles to 30 m.p.h. next year might speed up the general flow of traffic and could well lead to a reduction in accidents by alleviating frustration caused by delay to the drivers of faster vehicles.
Nevertheless, with the increasing volume of traffic, the problem and cost of minimizing traffic delays and accidents might become acute unless an aggr essive road-improvement programme was rapidly completed, regardless of economic or other difficulties.
A speed limit of 60 m.p.h. for cars and 45 m.p.h. for commercial vehicles on all-purpose roads would be desirable when a motorway system was available, whilst a maximum of 75 m.p.h. and a minimum of 45 m.p.h. on the proposed motorways would help to minimize accidents resulting from excessive speed.
The fact that many abnormal loads could not travel by rail or water was difficult for any layman to appreciate. Rail transport was generally tied to widths of 9 ft., although on certain routes 13 ft. 6 in. was available for Sunday travel only. Between Newcastle and London, a wide load could take eight week-ends in transit by rail.
Great advances in mechanical design and operating efficiency of road vehicles
had been largely nullified by the conditions of the roads they were compelled to use. Apart from the cost to the overall economy of the high accident rate on sub-standardroads, costs of delay, mechanical wear and tear of _vehicles and tyres, and high fuel consumption were a dead loss to general productivity.
The British Road Federation bad calculated that the savings in total operating costs of different classes of vehicle on motorways, as compared with the present road system, could be between 27 per cent. and 37 per cent., according to the type of vehicle.
In Germany, Belgium and Holland. large programmes of road construction were in progress because those countries firmly believed that they could not afford to be without good roads. By comparison, the programme envisaged for Britain was very.small.
Certain ,suggestions were made as to the part rail transport might play in relieving the road problem. One of these was that consideration should be given to further development of the existing container system and of the so-called " piggy-back " system which was becoming increasingly used in the U.S.A., in which trailers were loaded on to rail wagons and hauled to and from the nearest station by tractor.
Railways as Motorways
In large centres of population, such as London, consideration might be given to re-siting the main-line termini on the fringe of development near ring roads. The existing track through the heavily developed area might then be used for the construction of urban motorways to give access to the heart of cities.
The claim had been put forward this year that Britain could, if it came to the point, organize itself to dispense with railways, but it could not by any stretch of the imagination do without roads. This point of view was disputed, because Whatever improvements were made to the roads, they could hardly deal with an additional 73m. ton-miles of freight traffic per day, irrespective of the increased passenger load.