Branch Lines

The Greens have rejected the renationalisation of energy, and that is one of several excellent reasons to reject the Greens, just as Ed Miliband's expected veto of any further drilling in the North Sea will be one of several excellent reasons to reject the Labour Party, including by means of disaffiliation from it on the part or my trade union, Unite. Instead, once we had harnessed the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy, then let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on publicly generated electricity. As Peter Hitchens writes:

Britain's latest, most modern stretch of railway line has been ready for use since October but has yet to carry a single passenger.

Nobody knows when it will. An ultra-modern station likewise sits unused in the handsome Buckinghamshire town of Winslow, gleaming with newness by day and glowing brilliantly by night, but no traveller can reach its smart platforms, for there are no trains, just security guards.

It is said that a lone nostalgic steam excursion has clanked its melancholy way through, as its patrons stared, baffled at the ghostly untouched buildings. Test trains, freshly-painted and pristine, occasionally pass through with nobody aboard.

Otherwise, the line, which will cost £7 billion if it is ever completed, is the preserve of blank-sided freight trains.

Official sources won't say much, but everyone in the rail business knows that the line is unused and wasted (imagine the revenues lost by this) because of a dispute between the rail unions and the Department for Transport.

The government, obsessed for years with getting rid of guards on trains, has for some reason decided to make this costly, badly-needed stretch of line into a railborne version of Custer's Last Stand.

The unions say that, after the knife rampage aboard a train at Huntingdon last November, the abolition of guards on trains is even dafter than it already was.

Most passengers, especially women worried about travelling alone, probably agree. It is fairly certain that the government will have to cave in anyway. So why not now?

This is not HS2, a whole other story of folly, an absurdly overengineered line made much more expensive than it needed to be.

This is East West Rail, a simple reconstruction of about 90 miles of track between Oxford and Cambridge, which has so far got halfway.

It is one of the very few East‑West lines in the country. It cleverly links all the country's north-south mainlines and the Great Western line to South Wales and the West of England, allowing passengers and goods to bypass congested London.

It is a project which in many ways explains what has gone wrong with modern Britain, and especially its transport system. Its rebuilding is a huge admission of error, in steel, concrete and money. For it should never have been shut in the first place.

The line between Oxford and Cambridge was foolishly closed in December 1967. Even Dr Richard Beeching – the axeman appointed, in 1961, to devastate the railways by Tory Transport Minister Ernest Marples – did not urge its closure. But the Labour government of Harold Wilson, presumably lobbied by the road haulage industry, killed it off anyway.

Sixty years ago, in the age of cheap oil, everyone thought that roads, cars and huge lorries were the future. They believed trains were relics of a dead age, destined for the nearest museum or scrapyard. But bit by bit it has dawned on the world, even on the British government, that railways are actually the modern answer.

They have much lower friction than road transport and so use much less fuel. If electrified they can be powered by any fuel, from coal to wind. They are also clean, quiet and safe. Alas, we have lost much in the years during which these truths have dawned in the minds of Whitehall.

I have a special interest in this stretch of track. My brother and I used to travel on it between our home in Oxford and a boarding school in Cambridge. Had he but known it, my brother might have shared some of his journeys with the mighty author of the Narnia books, C.S. Lewis. Lewis called it the 'Cantab Crawler' because it did not go very fast.

But he liked it for its directness, and it carried him regularly to his professorial duties in Cambridge from his hillside house in Oxford, till his death in 1963.

The names of its stations could have been set to music as a lament for village England and railway branch lines in general – Islip, Oddington, Marsh Gibbon & Poundon, Launton, Steeple Claydon, Verney Junction, Winslow, Swanbourne, Sandy, Potton, Gamlingay and Lord's Bridge.

At Marsh Gibbon & Poundon, the platform seemed to have sunk into the marsh, and steps had to be brought up to the carriages so that passengers could climb down. Otherwise, they would have had to jump.

We always seemed to reach that particular station at dusk, with gas lamps just coming on, and an ancient, bent and cadaverous porter in a peaked cap attending to the steps. I have often wondered if Lewis had modelled his gloriously pessimistic swamp-dwelling character Puddleglum on this remarkable man.

Both ends of the line, in those days, were more or less lost in the world before 1914, and the countryside between seemed extraordinarily private and unmodernised, with slow old pubs and creeper-covered vicarages amid the elms.

Much of it is the landscape of John Bunyan's classic The Pilgrim's Progress, and in those days it would have been recognisable to him. Not any more. The elms are all gone. The frenzy of building and hedge-grubbing which has swept England since those days has changed it utterly.

The line also has a place in global history, for its halfway point was at the town of Bletchley, easily reached by mathematical boffins from both England's great universities. And that is why Bletchley Park – now so famous – was chosen as the nation's secret codebreaking headquarters during the Second World War.

The tracks survived closure for a while. Until privatisation in the 1990s, the occasional goods train or Christmas shoppers' special bound for Milton Keynes passed that way.

But when, 15 years or so ago, I bicycled along the 90-mile route (or as close as I could get to it) to see what had happened, the cuttings were choked with brambles and the steel rails had evaporated – as expensive metal tends to do if you leave it lying around in modern Britain.

It probably takes longer to get from Oxford to Bletchley now by road than the 'Crawler' used to do. Try to drive between Oxford and Cambridge (or, worse, try to take the bus) and despite the spending of billions of pounds on new dual carriageways and costly engineering projects, it is an awkward and frustrating journey, involving an astounding number of roundabouts in Milton Keynes, a place which did not exist pre-1967.

Oddly, road engineers did know, back then, about 'induced demand'. This is an effect discovered in the USA, in St Louis, Missouri, in the 1930s – that road improvement schemes lead to increased traffic.

Anyone who doubts this only needs to visit the M25, but in the Britain of the 1960s the traffic chiefs and transport ministers acted as if this truth was unknown, and it was the season for axed railways and new bypasses.

Well, that season has at last come to an end. Why were we so stupid? Even a child at the time could see it was wrong.

Everywhere lines slashed by Beeching are coming to life again. The trains are fuller than ever despite their outrageous fares, and if we are to have a new oil shock then the government may have the sense to electrify the East West Rail line, something it has so far been too cheap, mean and short-sighted to do.

But first of all, it has to actually open it, and then get on with completing it all the way.

I long to travel on it once more, for the first time in nearly 60 years, though as I look out of the window searching for those lost spires and farms of long ago, and for the sunken platform at Marsh Gibbon, my view may be blurred a little by tears.