Where Worlds Collide

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | SRA ‘forcing freight from rail to lorries’

Looks like rail freight might have to pay the price of the millions spent on ‘boiling frogs’, with the lions share of budget cuts falling on freight schemes. All because freight, unlike commuters, does not vote. Except that most people, if they were actually asked, would like to see fewer heavy lorries on the road and more freight on the railwas. A single freight train carries the equivalent of 20 heavy lorries.

Compared with most other nations of Europe, and even with the free-market USA, the UK’s railways carry a pathetically small percentage of domestic freight traffic; rail has lost almost all general distribution traffic and is largely restricted to bulk traffics such as coal and aggregates.

While the true story is probably more complicated, I believe the long-term decline, especially during the 1980s, was due to deliberate government policy to strangle it in the interests of the road haulage industry. Why else did rail freight traffic increase quite significantly after privatisation, when the newly privatised companies no longer had to make artificially high returns on assets, as dictated by The Treasury.