Dolphin Escort

21st September 1962, Page 243

21st September 1962

Page 243

Page 243, 21st September 1962 — Dolphin Escort

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COASTWISE shipping interests have complained that the new Transport Act diminishes their protection against railway competition. In spite of this, they do not seem to be doing too badly. It is the deep-sea trade that appears to be suffering the severest setback at the present time. The explanation given by Mr. William Eccles, managing director of James Fishes and Sons, of Barrow-in-Furness, is that his company specialize in trade round the coast of Britain, although they will take goods farther afield if required.

Mr. Eccles' status as a transport expert might be called into question if he did not also allow himself to make one f those curious comparisons that have now become almost ,)bligatory. He went on to name road transport as his t!ompany's main competitor, and to suggest that the cheaper prices quoted by road operators were due to the fact that :hey were not concerned in the payment of cranage costs And harbour dues. It was rather unfair, he complained, that when extra large loads go by road, the carriers are ;IN en police escorts and similar facilities, for which no direct :harge is made.

The problem at issue is the old impossible one of trying .o equate two completely different forms of transport. No Joubt Mr. Eccles would like to see hauliers paying for he escorts that are forced upon them by law. If the same principle were applied to criminals under arrest, and in 3ther ways, we should soon have our police force for lot hing.

DR perhaps the shipping companies feel that, when they lave a special load on board, they also should be entitled .o an escort of sea scouts riding upon dolphins. This would ;o part of the way towards eliminating the unfair situation ii which the ships have the sea roads, untouched by human and and requiring no maintenance, whereas on land every iard of road has to be built and kept in good repair. To ven matters up, it might be a good idea to flood the roads o a depth of several feet and see how the hauliers manage n those conditions.

However absurd or inapposite, the comparisons continue inabated. Most commonly, they involve road and rail. Me main purpose is nearly always to prove statistically hat the train is many times more efficient than the road 'chicle, and that the continued drift from rail to road must )e due merely to some odd perversity. The arguments are !Nen more ingenious than the ancient paradox of Achilles ind the tortoise, and it would not be surprising if many )eople found them convincing.

One favourite comparison is between the number of )eople employed in each form of transport. It begins with he fact that 19,000 m. ton miles were handled by rail in 960. and 27,000 m. by road. A reasonable estimate could )1.: that, say, 250,000 people are involved in the railway !eight services, and four times as many are required for oad goods transport. To swing the balance still further, here are perhaps twice as many people employed on the tpkeep of the roads as on the maintenance of permanent Nay and signals. The statistical conclusion from all this s that road transport is much more wasteful of manpower, 1-1/1 that all traffic should be transferred to rail in the nterests of greater productivity.

The manpower picture is filled in further by comparing vhat is needed to move representative vehicles. On rail.

it is pointed out, a crew of three with a motive unit capable of producing 2,000 h.p. can haul 500 tons at high speed, and this takes no account of the improvements in performance that can be expected as the railways are modernized. On road, one man arid 150 h.p. are needed to haul only 16 tons at perhaps half the speed of a fast goods train. With a little organization, it should be possible to save 125 lorries and nearly the same number of men, and even then to cover the ground twice as quickly.

NATURALLY in order to clinch the matter, the accident statistics are brought into play. There are different ways of reckoning these, but according to one method there were 130 deaths caused in accidents involving freight trains in 1960, and in the same year 1,600 people were killed in accidents involving road goods vehicles. The inference is that lives would have been saved if all the traffic had gone by rail.

Challenged to race the tortoise, Achilles, it will be remembered agreed to handicap himself because he knew himself to be a very much better runner. However, when he reached the starting point of the tortoise, the latter had gone a little way ahead, and had made further progress by the time Achilles came to that second point. This process could continue indefinitely, the argument ran, Achilles would never quite catch up, and the tortoise must be judged the winner.

The flaw in the argument is obviously that it confines itself to that section of the course in which the tortoise was still in front, and left the rest of the race out of the calculation. There is a similar drawback to the statistics advanced to prove the superior efficiency of the railways. They apply over only a very small part of the .field, and for practical purposes are irrelevant. Plainly, from a commonsense point of view, this must be so; otherwise, the figures show such an overwhelming advantage to the rail side that, if they really meant anything, there would be no hope at all for road operators.

IMPORTANT though it may be in the right context, efficiency of operation means nothing in itself. It must, be related to the requirements of the customers. They will perhaps always find some use for the kind of service at which the railways excel, but for the remainder of their goods they have decided that other forms of transport are more suitable. Because transport has such an important part to play in the industrial life of the country, the Government are in the right when they decide that the forms of transport most needed by trade and industry should be developed.

The road programme is in no way affected by arbitrary and abstract methods of measuring the efficiency of different forms of transport. What may be assumed is that, as more and better roads are built, users and vehicle manufacturers will be enabled jointly to improve the' servicegiven by road transport. Progress along these lines is also the practical and constructive way of reducing road accidents, and thus cancelling out another of the statistical arguments advanced to prove that the roads used by everybody are less suitable for goods traffic than the railways, who are fortunate in having their track to themselves.