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More Being Spent on Road
Page 69
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Than Rail: Mr. A. B. B. Valentine
Excess of Facilities and Unrealistic Rail Rates Make Transport Unnecessarily Costly
CRITICS of the expenditure of about £1,500m. on railway modernization were answered last week by Mr. A. B. B. Valentine, a member of the British Transport Commission. Delivering his presidential address to the Railway Students' Association, he said that the modernization plan was merely part of a major revolution on the railways.
Nearly half the £1,500m. would in any event have had to be spent to replace worn-out railway equipment. Only the remainder of that sum represented the true measure of modernization involved in the plan.
Moreover, the £1,500m. was to be spent on both .stock and permanent way. Only about 1100m. related to track, bridges, fly-overs and so on, and another £100m. to signalling. Spread over 15 years, the annual expenditure on track and signalling was £14m., compared with the minimum of £60m. a year to be spent on new and improved roads during the next few years.
Over a 15-year period some £900m. was to be spent on railway rolling stock, compared with Mr. Valentine's estimate of about £4,500m. on road vehicles, excluding cars for private use.
Cost Not Too Great
"Expenditure on railway modernization cannot be considered disproportionately large in relation to the traffic carried, compared with such expenditure upon road transport," he said. "In any case, the proper spheres of rail and road transport are far more complementary to each other than competitive."
'Railways were not being expanded: the reverse was the case. They were concentrating on those functions which they could perform more efficiently than other forms of transport.
Apart from making possible an immense variety and volume' of national activities and adding to the country's income, the rise in mechanical road transport would prove a blessing to the railways, once they had adjusted themselves and set the stage for the redistribution of traffic between road and rail on a much more economic basis than at present.
Traffic collected into train-loads and hauled over well-used main lines could be carried far more cheaply, in terms of ton-miles, than would ever be possible by road. In fact, costs were so low that a good deal of assembly, sorting and distribution could be borne, before the overall unit cost from door-to-door approached that of road transport throughout.
With a limited number of centres served by rail, the railways and their customers would be relieved of a heavy burden of costs of distribution in detail by rail, which could be done much more cheaply by road.
In closing wayside depots the problem of making alternative provision for the needs of local coal merchants, in the face of established interests, was not always easily solved, Nevertheless, ways must be devised to relieve both branch lines and superfluous depots on main routes of coal and other wagon-load traffic, and to deal with them elsewhere on the railway, "because it would be unthinkable that the economical trunk hauls of coal which railways are so preeminently fitted to perform should be undertaken in any other way.
Transport Too Expensive "The nation as .a whole for some time past has been wastefully paying more than it need for its transport, partly because there is an excess provision of transport equipment in total (quite apart from the current temporary recession in demand), and partly because uneconomic charges are preventing a lot of traffic from moving by what is in reality the cheapest means." said Mr. Valentine.
The under-employment of too much transport equipment would be only partly cured by streamlining the railways. It was too much to expect that the withdrawal of much road haulage employed for longer distances, especially for regular flows and heavy traffics on main routes, would be voluntarily offered, until unrealistic railway charges were gradually corrected.
"When these substantial transfers of traffic, both from rail to road and road to rail, have been effected," he said, "the overall cost of transport to the nation as a whole will have been substantially reduced. The total transport equipment provided, if properly adjusted to accord with this redistribution of traffic (as it certainly will be on the railways), will then be much more fully employed. . . . The further advantage of a measure of relief to road congestion will prove to be no contemptible by-product."
Where the railways were competing with road transport, whether public or private, they Were up against door-to-door delivery. In fact, a large part of railway freight traffic travelled from door to door by rail alone. More than 90 per cent, of the tonnage of rail freight was forwarded from private sidings and ports, and nearly 75 per cent, was delivered to private sidings and ports, using rail transport throughout.
Cheaper Transhipment Although coal, ores, bulk raw materials and products of heavy industry were the bread-and-butter business of the railways, these traffics alone would not absorb the full capacity of the railway system, even when streamlined. lf the railways were substantially to increase their share of other traffics, nothing was more important than to simplify the process and cheapen the cost of transhipment between road and rail at each end of the rail portion of the journey. Much had been done in this direction.
Quoting sheet steel as a traffic requiring reliable transit to the point of consumption and the avoidance of damage, Mr. Valentine said: Unless the commercial railway staff master and take responsibility for the service and the cost of the whole transit from point of origin to destination, they will never be able to compete on quite equal terms with the road haulier offering a throughout service in one vehicle, or to talk the same language to C-licensees."
When the railways had been modernized and charges became more realistic, the field for keen competition in which road and rail could offer closely corresponding terms and service would be a good deal smaller than it. seemed today. The future relationship between road and rail must be thought of mainly in terms of co-operative arrangements, designed to combine the best features of each form of transport in the common interests of the undertakings and of trade and industry.