Let The Train Take The Strain

This, by Peter Hitchens, is so good that I hope he won't mind my reprinting it in full here:

Here's a brief thought on a question that continues to baffle me. Transport, as it is unexcitingly called, is one of the most important responsibilities of government. Run well, it can make a whole country more civilised and more enjoyable. Visit Switzerland if you want to see what I mean. The Zurich trams are so good, reliable, clean, safe, comfortable and swift that businessmen leave their Mercedes at home. Clean, regular, reasonably-priced trains hurry from everywhere to everywhere punctually and at satisfying speeds. Result, pleasanter, cleaner, more spacious cities and a more unspoiled countryside, happier people, more efficient business, plus a general feeling of sociability, missing where everyone is in a private box.

Run badly, it can make the simplest task into a misery, blight whole hours of the day, discourage sociability, and drive millions into bad-tempered rage which all-too-frequently gets taken out on those around them. It can add needless hours to an already long working day. I find it quite amazing that Britain, a rich, compact country, which invented passenger railways and which has been so blessed with superb engineers and builders, should have made such a mess of its roads and railways - and, as a result, of its cities and countryside.

First of all, let us consider the wild frenzy of rail closures that followed Sir Richard Beeching's deeply mistaken report, published in March 1963.

The report was so destructive that even the British government - always a sucker for bad ideas - in the end balked at putting it all into effect. But it withdrew railway services from a huge part of the country, on the daft grounds that smaller, less busy lines were not profitable and were therefore not worth keeping open. Here are a few examples of its results known in detail, personally, to me, because I used long ago to use the lines involved. One is the old LSWR main line from Exeter to Plymouth, a great feat of engineering that curved round the northern edge of Dartmoor. This was closed in the mid-1960s, and is now greatly missed - especially when the sea washes away or swamps the other line to Plymouth, which runs along the coast at Dawlish. The part of the line east of Exeter is still in existence, but is only a single line, so cannot be used to take extra trains when engineering works (which seem to be amazingly frequent) close down the line at Taunton. This line would also come in very handy during the summer months, when the existing services to the South West are so crowded that reservations are compulsory.

Then there is the line between Oxford and Cambridge, one of the very few East-West rail routes in the country, also destroyed in the 1960s. This is not only a loss to the two university cities, which now have no civilised connection between them, only an interminable bus service, a long and unpleasant car journey, or a lengthy rail voyage via London involving a tangle with the Circle Line of the London Tube, a service so unreliable and nebulous that I find it quite hard to believe in at all. It also means that useful goods and passenger link between the old Great Western main line (to Wales, Birmingham and the South West) and the old LMS main line (to the North-West and the West of Scotland) and the old LNER main line (to the North East and the East of Scotland) has been lost. I am sure there are plenty of other examples of such foolish closures known to other readers. These on their own are evidence of the unreasonable and myopic policies of the 1960s, when everyone imagined that the car was king and railways were doomed. Near where I live there are now several substantial towns - Abingdon, Wantage, Cirencester, Farringdon, Witney, Wallingford, Thame - which have no rail service at all. These are not little villages, but proper places, where you now have to have, or use, a car to join the national transport system.

Now, just imagine if somebody (let us call him Dr Richard Botching) was asked to study the profitability of Britain's roads. What would he find? Thousands of suburban Acacia avenues simply don't justify the cost of maintaining them. Hundreds of rural B-roads, not to mention unclassified country roads, likewise make a colossal loss. (Actually, he would find that every inch of road in the country was run at an enormous loss and subsidised heavily by the taxpayer, but let that pass for the moment, I'll get back to it). And then say Dr Botching issued a report recommending that these 'unprofitable' routes were shut, and that people would just have to find their own way to centres where they could join the remaining, truncated road network. Dr Botching would not become Sir Richard Botching, let alone Lord Botching. He would probably be given Care in the Community, and his report hurled into the nearest bin. And yet Dr Botching's logic is exactly the same as Dr Beeching's.

And, as a result of this brilliant businessman's unhinged review of our railway system, the sixties saw the deliberate ripping up of thousands of miles of irreplaceable track - some of it actually built with great foresight so as to link up with a future Channel Tunnel, and carry the wider trains used on the continent. They destroyed hundreds of bridges and tunnels, built at great cost in money, effort and often lives, untold numbers of cuttings and embankments, dug out in Victorian times with enormous effort. Take a country walk in most parts of southern England and you will come upon the relics of this grand absurdity, the grass growing over what could by now be modern, reliable transport links, friendly to the environment and saving who knows how much space, who knows how much noise, who knows how much fuel imported from unstable despotisms.

They threw away land which had been carefully assembled - at a time of much lower land prices - to provide efficient and sensible routes between and through towns and cities. It was amazing how swiftly crucial pieces of such land were sold off and built upon, how rapidly bridges were demolished, so that there was no hope of putting back what had been lost except at unthinkable expense. All this irreplaceable national wealth was trashed in a brief, unreasoning frenzy - in the short time before the world became aware that it could not depend forever on cheap oil and petrol, and before we in this country realised that the American transport solution of more and more, wider and wider superhighways was both impractical and unaffordable in our much smaller landscape. Not that it worked in the USA either.

Now, people are often short-sighted in politics and business, and this doesn't make them left or right wing. But once it is clear that a major mistake has been made, it is up to conservatives to point out that it would have been better to leave things alone, and that what has been destroyed should, where possible, be replaced and repaired. But the role of the Tory Party in this vandalism was to cheer it on at the time, to do nothing effective to reverse or mitigate it, and to make it even worse though rail privatisation. Lady Thatcher spoke at one time of a 'Great Car Economy' and was noted for rarely if ever travelling by train, even when it would have made much more sense to do so. But she had more sense than to privatise British Railways. John Major, a competitor for worst Prime Minister in History on so many grounds, ignored all warnings (and there were many) against his privatisation scheme, which had the effect of making the railways more expensive and worse, and in destroying any central direction which might (for instance) plan a new system of high-speed trains, electrify a major main line or reopen strategic links lost in the 1960s. The taxpayer also has the worst of all possible worlds, paying fat subsidies to the railways but with almost no say in how they are run.

In what way is this policy conservative? In what way, come to that, does it serve the free market? Tories often seem to assume that the road network, without which every car in the country would be less useful for transport purposes than an electric lawnmower, just exists. But it doesn't. It is the result of huge amounts of spending by national and local taxpayers, a colossal unacknowledged nationalised industry which would collapse in six months without its subsidies. The Left claim to be pro-railway - it was a left-wing author, David Hare who, in his powerful play 'The Permanent Way' rightly excoriated the idiots who brought us to the low point at the turn of the century, when there seemed to be a crash every few months. But in fact Left-wing governments, in the 1960s, 1970s and now have done little that is imaginative or bold to restore or encourage Britain's railway system. Perhaps it's fear of public opinion. Perhaps they are as devoted to the road lobby as the Tories seem to be, or perhaps they just listen to the Transport Department (which seems to think it is the Department for Motorways). Likewise, in the USA, supposedly the home of free market conservatism, it was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, who wrecked the (unsubsidised) passenger railroads. How? By pretending that the Interstate Highway network (America's motorway system) was necessary for evacuating the cities in the event of a nuclear war, and so securing federal funds for it. Everywhere a taxpayer subsidised motorway was built, passenger rail services rapidly declined. The USA now badly needs high-speed rail services in many areas, but has only one proper fast passenger line, between Boston and Washington DC. The rest of the system is constantly on the edge of closure, despite some very dedicated attempts by the passenger railroad system, Amtrak, to stay alive. But the argument that subsidising railways is somehow unfair and wrong, whereas roads are the land of the free, simply doesn't stand up.

Railways are conservative, in Britain especially, because we invented them and they are ideally suited to our landscape. They are conservative because they help to conserve countryside, and because they are, when well run, a disciplined service requiring loyalty and dedication from their workers, not unlike the armed forces. They are conservative because they can be made to rely on national sources of energy, since electricity can be produced by nuclear reactors, coal or even waves. They are conservative because, by giving a centre to towns and cities, they promote cohesion and discourage shapeless ribbon development and the atomisation of society which follows when everyone relies on the car for transport.

Cars, on the other hand, encourage globalism in culture and economics, force us into dependency on oil states and therefore influence our foreign policy in unconservative directions, radically reshape cities and countryside, marginalise the old who cannot afford to run them, break up established communities by their greed for land and by the way in which modern roads act as impassable barriers.

And I won't even go into the problems of air travel, and the way in which this is subsidised and encouraged at the expense of railways.