Better than pressed men
Page 25
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Y a hairsbreadth the NUR was prevented from another of its acts of folly last weekend. It took tough Government talking to bring the railwaymen to their senses; and preliminary plans had already been laid for emergency road services to keep essential supplies moving. Not for the first time.
Is it too much to hope that the vision of might-havebeen will be enough to bring the Government, too, to its senses in this matter of road and rail?
Who is going to have the spare long-distance capacity to run emergency services when the trunk men have been driven off the road by the Minister of Transport's 100-mile limit?
At the first of the RHA's emergency public meetings on the new proposals last week, the secretary-general called the mileage limit "a crushing blow to the road haulage industry" and warned that the intention to give semi-monopolistic powers to a railway system already incurring losses of £134m a year might go far towards ruining the country's whole economy.
We hope his words are heeded in the right places. One forecast this week put the likely rail loss for 1967 at £145m; and although a national strike was avoided this time, the railwaymen's record of stoppages and major disputes in the past dozen years reads like the battle honours of a suicide brigade. January 1955, May 1958, January 1960, February 1962, October 1962, April 1963, January 1966, October 1967—plus several fairly important skirmishes and that wearisome Freightliner depots campaign of 1965-6.
Anyone who arbitrarily compels reliance on a system with that sort of record has an eggs-in-one-basket approach that is frightening.
The whole business has been overcast with a kind of bitter irony. Six weeks ago we half-jokingly suggested on this page that the NUR might arrange a national stoppage to coincide with the first of the Minister's White Papers. Well, it nearly happened, didn't it? But the Minister's document (dealing with railway finances and structure) looks as though it, too, is a nonstarter for this week after all.
To compound the irony of the whole thing, while the NUR was voting last week to go ahead with the strike, BR representatives in Birmingham were pleading their case for another 22 artics to service Freightliners.
Among their opponents were hauliers ready and willing to put long-haul traffic voluntarily on to rail; and this is the key. Recently a BR official admitted that half of all new Freightliner traffic was now originating from hauliers.
Is not that a far better way to achieve "rationalization" of long-distance transport than the dangerous and arbitrary one that Mrs. Castle proposes?