> > John, > The arguement breaks down on the cost to build rail service to every > small town in order to feed the big towns. > Regards, Bob S.
In the mid 60s here there was a wholesale and much-lamented closure of small, unprofitable railway lines that linked tiny communities. Many of them were turned into walking and cycling tracks through beautiful and fairly remote country (but no train to take you there!). My schoolmates and I helped with the building of one in Derbyshire called the Tissington Trail. The railway station in the town where we boarded was pulled down and redeveloped as a swimming pool, which was a great improvement over the awful unheated outdoor pool we had previously had to use. If you read literature of the early 20th century you notice that these small lines were quite embedded into the social fabric of the day, even if they were unprofitable. Some of the stations were built solely to serve the local big house, and in PG Wodehouse's books you see Wooster and Jeeves and the like making extensive use of them for weekend country house parties. It's considered to be an inevitable tragedy that so many were closed, because of the impact on rural communities, and it's quite possible that many of them could have been made payable, or subsidised to keep them open for social reasons. The distribution of support for different transport schemes has been unfairly loaded in favour of roads for decades. Most of the lines were probably never profitable even when they were built. The early railway boom in this country turned into a bubble rather like the dot.com boom. The railway lines were built as vanity or speculative projects off the back of inflated share prices. When the bubble burst a lot of people lost a lot of money and we were left with a wonderful infrastructure that could rarely pay for itself and which was dealt the death blow after WW1 when road transport came into its own. I'm still convinced that if the government spent as much money on the railways and had the level of commitment to them that they have now to the road lobby we would all be a lot better off, and so would the environment. Bob > > On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 2:08 PM, John Sessoms > <[email protected]> wrote: > > From: Bob Sullivan > >> > >> It's the distance between cities that kills rail here. > >> Except on the east coast, travel times between big cities > require an > >> overnight ride. > >> Planes are so much faster for anything over 200 miles. > >> Been that way since 1947... > >> Regards, Bob S. > > > > There are a couple of flaws I find with that argument ... > > > > Who says service has to be only between big cities? Seems > to me local > > services are what makes rail transportation viable. Feed > from the small > > towns into the big cities and back again; and take the high > speed expresses > > between big cities. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
