Taking the very long view
Page 19
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Rail freight is an unconscionable time a'dying. Left to itself, both here and on the Continent, it would have long since faded into history, but new champions keep giving it the kiss of life for a variety of motives.
In Britain in the Thirties the platform was the patriotic sounding Square Deal. Immediately after the War the revival was political, as part of a Socialist belief in State enterprise. The Sixties brought Dr Beeching'S promise of economically sound medicine, followed by Mrs Castle's abortive road-to-rail switch and the writing-off of hundreds of millions of pounds in a vain attempt to enable the railways to pay their way.
Then, just as a Tory Government was nerving itself to use the knife, the Environment arrived on a white horse to stay the deed. This provided a ready-made platform on to which the Labour Party has now climbed to espouse yet another railway revival, at the expense of road freight.
If these prolonged preservation antics look ridiculous at close quarters, from a distance they appear inexplicably ill-judged. As recorded in this issue, we have recently been studying transport in Brazil, which, "to avoid the transport mistakes made in Europe-, has consciously chosen road transport as the basis for its industrial expansion and its social integration policy. In a country of continental proportions— nearly 3000 miles wide and deep — with vast mineral resources, railways might seem the obvious choice. But the one basic lesson the Brazilians claim to have learned from studying the more highly developed countries is that there is no substitute for flexibility. Rail will be used only where bulk flows are assured.
Even though conditions in Brazil are in many ways unlike Europe, our politicians would do well to pay heed to that distant voice before pouring more hundreds of millions of pounds down the railway drain — in vain. The benefits to the environment which the public believes would result are largely illusory.