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'Consider Road Transport, Too'

19th April 1963, Page 13
19th April 1963
Page 13
Page 13, 19th April 1963 — 'Consider Road Transport, Too'
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

FROM OUR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

STRONG Labour Party and trade union pressure is being put on the Government to consider road transport as well as rail before the Beeching axe begins its downward swing.

Dr. Beeching himself is being noncommital in public. But he has already stressed that his plan for cutting out onethird of the rail system still leaves a framework to meet reasonable public requirements.

Fuel to the fires of demand for a thorough road-rail survey has now been added by the Central Transport Consultative Committee for Great Britain, the body which will in future act as a watchdog over rail services, and whose area committees will judge public hardship in the matter of passenger closures.

In its annual report for 1962--the last few months of which gave it new terms of reference—the Committee warns the Government that, judging from its 12 years' experience, the negative policy of rail closure has not proved the panacea it has sometimes been made out to be.

Each closure of services, however uneconomic, has diverted some business to the roads, and these losses must have contributed materially to the poor railway results of the past five years.

The Committee considers there is an urgent need for a study of the overall costs of all forms of transport, including the costs of congestion, accidents and health services.

This survey ought to be published, and it might well reveal that the effect of subsidies, open and hidden, in the overall field might be giving a completely false picture of the costs of various methods of transport.

As for the railways' personal problems, the Committee says : " Without radical improvements in the pattern, speed, comfort and punctuality of the passenger and freight train services offered, the Railways Board will never stop making stupendous losses".

The Committee accepts, however, that many loss-making local trains will have to be replaced by bus services. It adds: We hope that such services can be so timed as to provide a real substitute for the trains, rather than one which does not connect with trains or terminate in their vicinity ".

Dealing with its new freedom from the necessity to review all the recommendations of area committees, the Central Committee continues: " We hope that it will be possible to consult with the road passenger transport interests so as to establish a much more effective form of co-ordination between railways and buses than hitherto.

"We appreciate there are considerable practical difficulties in co-ordinating timetables between existing stage carriage road services and trains, but where road services are substituted for trains, we feel that these difficulties need not arise."

In particular, the Committee supports the call of its north-western area committee for a comprehensive review of services in the area covered by Manchester, south-east Lancashire and northeast Cheshire.

Since they began to investigate closures in 1950, and up to the time their functions were changed last August, area consultative committees = agreed to the axing of 4,129 miles of railway routes, of which 796 were freight and 811 passenger-freight. The rest were passenger lines.

At the same time, 1,075 stations were closed. Saving to the railways (which the Committee questions) of all this totalled over £5,000,000,


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