On the Rebound
Page 54
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by JANUS
FOR some reason there has been considerable speculation about whether British Road Services, in its new-found isolation, will seek to become a member of the Road Haulage Association, and whether the R.H.A. will accept the application if it is made. Both questions seem no more than nibbles at the edge of a far more fundamental problem. They might have been asked cogently at any time during at least the past five years. The obstacles in the way of positive answers have neither been increased nor diminished by the passage of the Transport Act of 1962.
What is of present importance is the possibility of closer co-operation between nationalized road transport and independent hauliers. If the co-operation reaches the point where a united front within one association seems natural, the necessary approaches and adjustments will be made, very likely with the minimum of fuss. Membership of the R.H.A. will come at the appropriate stage of co-operation. It will not be used as a means of speeding up the process.
There is no doubt that the process is going actively forward, aided powerfully by the apparent relief with which the railways have disencumbered themselves of irrelevant interests, including B.R.S. All the more significant because ..it may not be deliberate is the attitude of mind of Mr. G. F. Fiennes, chief operating officer, British Railways, as shown in his paper to the Institute of Transport on Monday (see page 51 of this issue). His theme is ro-operation in transport, and to a large extent he is concerned with cooperation between road and rail. In spite of this, he contrives to avoid even a single reference to B.R.S., and leaves it to be inferred that it is included when he speaks about public road hauliers.
They "have a war on their hands" with the railways, with the C licence holders and with each other, says Mr. Fiennes. One would suppose from this that British Railways and B.R.S. opposed each other's applications in the traffic courts as fiercely and as comprehensively as they oppose the applications of independent hauliers. Perhaps Mr. Fiennes is hinting that this will be the pattern for the future. He must know that a large part of the traffic now carried by B.R.S. is included in the 90 m. tons a year that the railways regard as their perquisite, and mean to have if at all possible. If he is signalling the end of the long engagement between the two forms of nationalized transport, there is an added chance that the R.H.A. will catch B.R.S. on the rebound.
THE serene confidence with which Mr. Fiennes speaks of the prospects for his own form of transport is all the more commendable when it is noted that railway receipts from freight services were over £14 m. less in 1962 than in 1961, and that the drop from £306-7 m. to.£292 m. was a continuation of the trend over many years. Morale must be good when it is still possible to offer hauliers the chance to co-operate in a manner that suggests they are being given their last chance of survival. There is now "for a short time ", Mr. Fiennes says, the opportunity for voluntary association between hauliers and the railways in the framing of what he considers will be "a new form of transport "; and there will be no opportunity at all where the railways believe they can offer "" shelf-to-shelf" transport to the trader more cheaply and as efficiently as the haulier.
536 It would be unfair to suggest that Mr. Fiennes is mainly concerned to preach the railway gospel under cover of fine talk about co-operation. His comparatively short paper is packed full of good things, all the way down to his conclusion that "voluntary association" offers a solution to the transport problem "in the widest and best political sense ". Hauliers would be foolish not to welcome this invitation, an up-to-date version of the principles on which the Road and Rail Central Conference was established just before the War. Hopes of a rapprochement now seem a certainty, and Mr. Fiennes' paper would be an important landmark in the history of transport for this reason alone, All the same, he is a railwayman first and last, and cannot escape his own limitations. He adumbrates a belief in the need for thinking about transport as a whole rather than about one particular form of transport, but he is not able, to live up to that belief. Instead, he is bitterly critical of Brigadier Walter's dictum that "transport policy is too serious a subject to be left to transport people ". While there is no particular merit in this dictum, it is nevertheless true that an impartial observer can sometimes see what ought to be done more readily than the experts, who tend to develop a mystique of their own and to adopt too narrow a point of view.
AGOOD illustration is provided by Mr. Fiennes himself, in showing what can be done to link producer, transporter and consumer in one voluntary association. Under the new system of transport that has been developed, the National Coal Board will arrange for its product to be conveyed into bunkers over two railway tracks, on which a series of trains will run. The wagons will be loaded swiftly in succession and will not be uncoupled. The consumer, in this case the Central Electricity Generating Board, will provide hoppers at its power stations, this time underneath the railway tracks. The floors of the wagons will open to shed their load, and in a matter of minutes the train, still in one piece, will be on its way to pick up another consignment.
Here is certainly an operation where road carriers could hardly hope to compete with rail, and where the railways have at last an opportunity to show their real quality. Where at present they need some 2,000 wagons to carry 5 m. tons of coal to a large power station, the new system will require only 205. It is also true, however, that the operation as outlined by Mr. Fiennes might with a few changes be a description of how the job could be done by pipeline. By a customary irony of history, the admirable conception of the merry-go-round train and the liner train, which never need to uncouple, is beginning to take shape just as the new Pipelines Act comes into effect. As fast as the railways attract traffic from the road—assuming that they realize this part of their intention—they may be losing it to another form of transportation.
Perhaps these reflections are unduly pessimistic. That they should have been stimulated by Mr. Fiennes' paper is a tribute to the imagination and experience that he has compressed into it. Other people who heard him will be prompted into thinking along very different lines. His merit is to have presented in the clearest form so far, at least from the railway side, the case in favour of transport users and transport providers of all kinds working together towards a common end.