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EVOLUTION EIRE

AS in so many other countries, the transport sceoe in Ireland is dominated by the road vehicle. On a small scale, but sharply defined, can be seen the road-rail problem which is worrying the Governments of the world—but not the peoples. In Ireland, public practice in travel and in the use of freight services increasingly favours the roads. This is a natural trend not only because of the greater convenience, flexibility, freedom of movement and the lower cost of road transport but because Ireland is very well provided with roads. The road mileage of approximately 50,000 is four times as great per 100,000 of population as in Britain.

Public policy nevertheless supports the• railways and the waterways and tends to disregard road requirements. Less than Om. was spent on the roads in 1949 by the local authorities aided by grants from central funds. This represents only a small proportion of the amount collected in direct taxes on road vehicles. In the same year a grant of £4m. was made to Coras Iompair Eireann, the national transport undertaking, to cover accumulated losses incurred mainly in operations on 2,000 route miles of railway tracks.

The theorists and publicists praise the value of railways and waterways in debates in the Dail, the Irish parliament, the Oireachtas, and in the newspapers. Privately, they are most frequently to be found travelling by or sending goods by road. Even governmental practice reveals no official compulsion or encouragement towards railways or waterways. Year by year, therefore, the fortunes of the railways decline.

As regards the waterways there is the Royal Canal, running 95 miles from Dublin to the Shannon at Tarmonbarry, via Mullingar and Ballymahon, with a branch to Longford. This is used almost exclusively for supplying water to C.I.E. locomotives. It was illstarred from the beginning, having been routed through territory incapable of producing enough traffic to sustain it. For almost a century a railway line has run parallel to it. The only other waterway is the Grand Canal which runs a more southerly course from Dublin. It also joins the River Shannon and thence to Ballinasloe. It has several branches and a connection with the river Barrow, a total of 345 route miles.

The Grand Canal was well conceived. For 150 years before the advent of railways it was the principal national carrier of long-distance passengers and freight. Nowadays it carries no passengers, and in 1949 the traffic carried totalled only about 120,000 tons—virtually nothing in the overall picture.

In recent years, enterprising private Management had been developing the use of road vehicles to a point where they seemed not unlikely to supplant canal traffic. On the canals there is a fleet of 50 all-steel semiDiesdl-engined 50-ton barges, and 33 privately owned boats. Road vehicles were originally intended only to supplement barges for local delivery work. Now that the Grand Canal system has been incorporated as the Royal had been for many years, in the nationalized public transport undertaking, the use of waterways seems likely to diminish still further.

The proportional use made of rail, road and canal in Ireland cannot be indicated with accuracy The private hauliers and the merchants and manufacturers who use the roads do not provide returns which would give an aggregate of their annual ton-miles. Yet a rough picture of the situation can be obtained by comparison of the numbers of vehicles employed by the public undertaking with those operated under private ownership.

C.I.E. now operates in 23 of the 26 counties of Eire. It carries 80 per cent, of the traffic available for public haulage. In 1949, its freight traffic amounted to 2,300,000 tons of merchandise, fuels, and other minerals, and 860,000 head of livestock were carried by rail on which work 12,000 wagons and 460 locomotives were employed. In addition 1,300,000 tons of goods and 220,000 head of cattle were carried by C.I.E. vehicles which total 540 lorries, plus trailers, containers and 420 horsed vehicles.

24,000 Private Vehicles

If C.I.E.'s comparatively small fleet of road vehicles carried 1,300,000 tons of freight in a year, what quantity was carried by the 24,000 privately owned vehicles which were also at work in the same year? Of the 24,000 only approximately 1,000 are owned by professional hauliers. Thei e are 900 such hauliers, of whom 730 are licensed to operate one vehicle only. About 100 are permitted to operate throughout the Republic, 400 may operate within an area of four or more counties, and the others are restricted to smaller territories.

It may be assumed that a vastly greater volume of traffic is moving along the roads in the privately owned vehicles than in those of C.I.E. and of the other professional hauliers. This includes the work carried out by the Great Northern Railway Co., the only other important railway company, which runs a cross-Border rail service, and within its limited district on the northeastern coast has 120 lorries serving 17 railheads. It is in the process of being acquired by the Governments of Eire and Northern Ireland.

The public undertakings do not purport to provide long-distance road freight services, except for special traffic such as fish and newspapers. They must give the B14 long hauls to the railways. Distance limits are imposed, as already shown, on the professional hauliers. Traders, however, are untroubled by such artificial impediments to the efficient use of road transport.

Every day, raw materials and finished products are moved across the length and breadth of the country by their vehicles. These show a strong leaning towards higher capacities and the employment of trailers. Tenton lorries with 6-ton trailers are now common, where formerly any vehicle of more than 5or 6-ton payload capacity was a rarity. Oil-engined vehicles are now invariably bought by C.I.E., and are increasingly the choice of the private owner.

The outstanding feature is that, quite apart from light vans, tractors and farmers' lorries used exclusively for farm purposes, there are 24,000 lorries plying on these Irish roads to-day—where in 1938 there were just over 10,000.

This development has been marked since shortly after the 1914-18 war. Most of the devices to stop or limit it, for the sake of the railways and waterways, which have been tried in other countries, have been tried here too and have been equally ineffective. In 1925, the privately owned railways, numbering more than a score, were amalgamated under statute and their capital Was reduced, then and later, to about 10 per cent, of its nominal issued value. In 1932, the amalgamated company was given power compulsorily to aCquire the professional operators of road freight and road passenger services, which, in fact, it did in most cases.

In 1941, when war-time exigencies made it essential, Government control of the railways was established through a nominated full-time chairman with special powers. In 1945, the Dublin transport department—a prospering undertaking—was merged with the railway company. In 1950, the coalition Government of Mr. Costello, which had replaced that of Mr. de Valera, nationalized the undertaking completely, bought out the private stockholders with replacement stock, and added in the privately owned Grand Canal to the national undertaking.

Despite these measures, road transport is in a stronger aosition to-day than ever and the railways are weaker. klthough the railways were amalgamated, for instance, Ind enabled to purchase their professional competitors, lothing was done to enable them to escape from their mtanglement in historic regulations, such as in relation co freight rates and "common carrier" obligations.

Again, they received no assistance towards purchasing Padly needed new equipment. Indeed, private dividends were paid or private losses minimized by " savings " on aormal maintenance and renewals—a natural enough policy for private owners, but one which proved most unprofitable for the country. War-time shortages of petrol and rubber resulted in greatly increased railway freight and passenger loadings. This extra strain was placed on railway equipment which had long been absolete, and which was quite inadequate.

In the post-war international clamour for steel, the Irish railway construction shops could not get more than a small fraction of their needs. On the other band, the unexpectedly rapid restoration of petrol and rubber supplies, and increased availability of the materials used for vehicle construction, enabled the privately owned transport industry speedily to overcome the war-time setbacks and to resume, with increased pace, the expansion of available capacity.

Three factors form the basis of Ireland's transport problems. One is the low density of population, the second the low degree of industrialization, and the third the dependence of the country on imports of raw material, including fuel for both road and rail transport. Coal, steel, iron ore and non-ferrous metals have to be imported from or through Great Britain, petroleum from the United States or the Middle East4 and timber from Scandinavia or North America.

No Heavy Industry The population of Eire is only 3m., 500,000 of which live in Dublin. There are no mines or heavy industries of any importance, so that the largest engineering shops in the country are those of the CIE. at Inchinore. Dublin, which employ about 2,000 men.

Agricultural produce forms the bulk of the traffic available. The biggest annual movement of produce is the haulage of sugar-beet to the State-owned factories in the provinces. The character of Irish freight may be gauged from the main items of C.I.E. rail returns for 1949-1950 figures are not yet available.

These were as follows: Beet, 340,000 tons; grain, ,310,000; ale and porter, including empties, 190,000; flour, bran and other mill offals, 140,000; groceries (excluding bacon, ham and butter), 160,000; fertilizers, 130,000; cattle, 590,000 head, and sheep, 170,000.

Although rail traffics show a disproportionate amount of low-grade traffics, attracted by the traditional railway ad valorem charges basis as against charges for road services based on operating costs, this is not so great as railway supporters sometimes pretend. Much highgrade freight is consigned in small lots by firms which either do not run their own lorries or else send their uneconomic surplus by rail.

The relatively small overall volume of freight and its wide distribution means that neither rail nor road transport can obtain optimum loading. In 1949 the rail side of C.I.E. showed a loss of over £lm.—a substantial sum in Ireland. Working costs were £6,350,000, receipts only £5,280,000.

The ancient bogy of dependence on foreign fuels, which had been raised formerly by the opponents of road transport, is nowadays seen in a truer light. Railway electrification being an impossibly expensive proposition in Ireland, locomotives remain dependent on British coal, Not only during the war, but since, Britain has shown increasing reluctance to allocate adequate supplies to Eire. The arrival of tankers with oil fuel from the Gulf of Texas or the eastern Mediterranean, on the other hand, has been at least as regular and often more reliable than the arrival of colliers from the other side of the Irish Sea.

The answer to the problem of essential imports for transport is hard to find, indeed. Settled international conditions would weigh the balance in favour of relying on petroleum for road vehicles. Peat, the only native Irish fuel obtainable in great quantity, would probably assure the future of the railways. But the use of peat as fuel is still only in the experimental stage.

To the present writer it seems that physical requirements may well force a decision on the part to be played by rail, road and canal in moving 'passengers and freight in Ireland. This may be reached much sooner than is anticipated.

Road Transport Strengthened

The post-war period has seen a general strengthening and re-equipment of Irish road transport, public and private, which might well enable it, if war comes, to carry the whole burden of essential freight and passenger services. The programme adopted by C.I.E. for railway rehabilitation, especially in connection with rolling stock, has not been disclosed and the evidences of it are few.

On the financial side, railway labour and material charges are rising to the danger point. Rail freights cannot support the necessary increases, and passenger revenue is already insufficient.

There is nothing to spare for purchase of new equipment, and although unused authority exists to raise £7m. for the purpose, nobody can show that new equipment would bring in enough extra revenue to cover interest and amortization of the new capital. The 72,000 private cars (five years ago there were only 50,000) represent mounting competition even for the reasonably modern CIE. fleet of 950 buses, which heretofore had always been profitable.

To sum up the question of physical assets. In peacetime, especially in the uneasy peace-time we know at present, even if a gamble were taken with the millions of pounds required, it is extremely doubtful if masses of new equipment would enable the railways to recapture their old supremacy in long-distance and heavy haulage, so as to become either financially selfsupporting or nationally indispensable. In war-time, the new equipment would be unobtainable, and the load on the obsolete equipment would be unsupportable.

Railways a Burden

As regards road transport, it is clearly going to grow and grow in peace-time. This would put the railways more and more into the position of an unwarrantable burden on the economic strength of this small country. In war-time, assuming availability of fuel—and, as we have mentioned, the odds in this respect lie fairly evenly against road and rail fuels alike —road transport should be much more capable of carrying the whole burden of essential traffic because of its better physical preparedness.

If the problems of•national policy and organization in connection with transport as a whole could be solved soon, republican Ireland might be able to offer the world a miniature example of the first comprehensive all-road national transport system. But, in this writer's opinion, such a system will develop in Ireland in any event. The issue of road versus rail will be determined by an inevitable process of evolution. DURING the joint engineering conference of the Institutions of Civil Engineers, Mechanical Engineers and Electrical Engineers, which opened in London on June 4 and closes to-day, visits were made to the works of C.A.V., Ltd., the coach and bus repair works of the London Transport Executive at Chiswick, A.E.C., Ltd., .Ford Motor Co., Ltd., Coopers Mechanical Joints, Ltd., and others. Several papers were also read.

DEVELOPMENT from the days when, because of severe legal

restrictions, road vehicles in this country were confined to steam traction engines and a few private steam carriages, was traced in "British Mechanical Road Transport Vehicles-1851-1951," by John Shearman, M.I.Mech.E., and B. B. Winter, M.I.Mech.E.

TAKING his audience back 2,000 years, Graham Townsend Bennett, 0.B.E., B.Sc , M.I.C.E., whose paper was entitled "Road Planning and Safety," said that the Romans produced the boldest road plan that had ever been devised.