Politicians are right for once
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I see Sir Henry Johnson, former chairman of British Rail, is pleading for more traffic to be switched from road to rail and asking for Freightliners to be transferred totally to British Rail. He says: "As a first step the excellent Freightliner service should be placed under the control of the railways who started and developed them.''
What Sir Henry does not say was that British Rail charged around the traffic areas with licence applications for vehicles to do the road end of the operation. At the time it seemed a lot of money was being spent to build an empire. But the empire went into hock and lost E31/2m in 1968, and that's more like £12m at today's money. The loss was about £10 per container carried.
Now under NFC's management the service carried 720,000 containers last year and made a profit of £1.3m. No, Sir Henry, the politicians were not wrong this time; we are all judged by results.