Tinkering About

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We were over at the boy's place for sausage-rolls and a cup of tea this lunchtime, and as usual we had a general family rant about the state of the world/country/politics/economics/religion/morality/ethics - delete as appropriate - when someone mentioned that they had heard that the state of the roads and their potholes was largely a function of changes of repair methodology and materials: ie. repairing less often, with cheaper, inferior materials. Mention was made of the overall increase in size and number of private vehicles in recent years causing more damage to road surfaces than the much smaller, lighter and fewer numbers of vehicles in the past.

As one we opined on the fact that no government has yet addressed that bloody great pachyderm in the room: freight. Freight. Heavy haulage. No UK road was designed to take heavily-laden forty-foot artics, or twenty-ton heavy wagons of stone and ballast, all of which would have been more sensibly transported in the past first by canal, then by railway, both of which are less environmentally damaging and more economical than messing around with essentially piddling amounts of freight being hauled by thousands of vehicles by road. The powerful postwar road transport lobby and Dr. Beeching have left us in this completely avoidable mess, and we need the(any) government to address it directly.

As far as the railways in this archipelago go, the sole emphasis in infrastructure development in recent years has been modest in scope if not cost, focussing on a handful of flagship vanity projects such as HS2 and Crossrail: all aimed at facilitating the travel of commuters [commuting itself being environmentally and economically questionable], rather than the deployment of an updated heavy freight rail network and local distribution hubs, which is where rail really shines. Investment in reinstating a branch network, larger freight yards and more local road/rail hubs would ultimately take a significant amount of heavy traffic away from the roads, making them safer, and easier to maintain to boot. Great British Railways? The railways will never be great again unless this fundamental structural issue is dealt with.



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