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Liner Trains : Where We All Came In. .
Page 38
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From our Industrial Correspondent
NO sooner had the Minister of Transport made his confident forecast that liner trains would be running before the end of the year (The Commercial Motor last week) than the NUR decided to keep up its opposition to the admission of private road hauliers to the proposed terminals.
But the rebuff to the Government may not be as serious as it seems. For one thing the 24-man executive of the union rejected the proposal only by the narrow margin of 13 votes to 11, which represented a decided swing since the last decision was taken a Month ago. It needs only one more member of the executive to be converted to the proposal for it to he carried by the president's casting vote.
Senior, officials of the union, including the general secretary. Mr, Sidney Greene, are known to favour giving the scheme a trial on the BR Board's terms. and if there is another appeal front the Government they may well get the requisite majority.
But if this cannot be achieved. the C2 Government will have to decide whether to give the Board the green light to go ahead with the trains despite union opposition— and risk the consequences. As Ministers from the Prime Minister downwards have repeatedly laid stress on the importance of the liner-train scheme in modernizing Britain's railways, they can hardly dodge the issue now.
The NUR decision was taken in the absence of Mr. Greene at a meeting of the TUC General Council. Whether this was a deliberate tactic by opponents of the scheme or just coincidence it is hard to say. Certainly Mr. Greene's presence might just have swung the issue. Be that as it may, the union executive rejected the present terms offered by the Board. In a second resolution it instructed Mr. Greene to inform he Board that the union " promised full co-operation in making the project a success providing terminals are closed to private hauliers ". But this, of course, is where we came in and does not really carry the matter any further.