Superbike Forums: Petrol prices...the 'truth'

There are some facts in there, but the conclusions are a bunch of arse. It's all very well to talk about 'investment in public transport' when you live in a densely populated conurbation and are trying to work out how to get 20 million 9-5 worker drones into, out of or around the middle of the urban jungle every day, but for the rest of us, it's a ridiculous concept.

As a general rule, in most situations, public transport gets you from somewhere you aren't, to somewhere you don't want to go, at a time you don't want to travel, via a route that only a drunken lemur would contemplate, very slowly, in great discomfort, in the company of people you'd normally cross the street to avoid. And rapes your wallet in the process. Much the same can be said of freight on the railway, except that the problems associated with shifting freight by rail apply even more acutely in London than they do elsewhere.

You want to put freight on the railways, but why rail? Why not the canals? Much more environmentally friendly, and they were there first!

The answer, of course, is that railways killed canals the way and for the same reasons that road haulage killed the railways. Rail was more flexible, had greater capacity and by the time rail came on stream the canals were in the wrong places. Road haulage didn't take freight off the rails because rail was knobbled! There are certain things that rail still does better than road. Moving millions of tons of coal from a pit that is never going to move to a power station that isn't going anywhere either? Brilliant. Except that we don't have many coal-fired power stations any more. Or many pits, come to think of it. A railway is as close as you can get to a pipeline for coal, and we are still building pipelines today for oil and gas, so where we are still producing and consuming coal it still has a role...

Hwever, moving plasma tellies from any one of a hundred places to any one of ten thousand retail outlets, via a distribution centre that is nothing more than a giant shed with a loading dock on and that could move somewhere a hundred miles away next week if it was a more convenient location... no. Railways are bollocks for that.

Anyway, even if they did still go to all the right places, our railways were mostly built a hundred years ago or more. And then people clustered around them, ensuring that they have no space to expand 'in line' anyway, plus even if they could expand, the alignment, tunnel clearances etc would be bollocks for modern channel-tunnel/TGV style high speed stock anyway. Hence the British dalliance with various Heath-Robinson tilting trains over the years - trying to travel quickly over victorian permanent way. They are essentially operating at capacity on the existing infrastructure already.

So 'better freight railway' is an oxymoron, and if you want 'better passenger railways', you'd need to build them from scratch. And given our national track record (boom boom) on building transport infrastructure, plus how expensive modern railway is per mile, plus what it has to compete with, plus what you would have to knock down to build it, plus how many Swampys you'd need to drag out of how many trees, it would be cripplingly expensive for everybody, and who would benefit?

Let's look at me. The shagged out main line between here and Paddington gives me a 4 hour trundle in to London, when it doesn't shit itself, and they charge me like a wounded rhino for the privilege. The bike is both a faster and a cheaper way to travel! The entire line is both a monument to the brilliance & ingenuity of Isombard Kingdom Brunel, and a decaying relic at the same time. So, you want to give me a railway I want to use in preference to the M4? Great. That will be a brand new 250 mile long high speed rail line, then, complete with new cuttings, embankments and tunnels blasted through mountains, new bridges and viaducts, a new Severn tunnel, great swathes cut through all the cities of South Wales including Cardiff & Swansea, Bristol, Bath, Swindon, Reading etc. Plus the hundreds of sexy new high speed supertrains. And now (or in 2030 when it opens, anyway) you can get to London from here in an hour. Of course if you live in Aberaeron you still have two hour's drive over shit roads before you get to the station in Carmarthen, but hey... and then to pay for it all, the operator either charges £500 a ticket (and runs empty trains then goes bust and requires bailing out by the taxpayer), or I ask you to subsidise my ticket through your sky-high taxes. Which you have no choice but to pay so that I can afford a rail ticket, while wondering why the roads round where you live are full of potholes and your bypass was cancelled.

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