Wales Gets Trains
Ok, they’ve had them for a while – although it might surprise some. The big news today is that the government is going to spend 1 billion pounds on electrifying the railway line between Swansea and London.
According to a guy called Lord Adonis (cool name, but the man himself is arguably the anti Lord Adonis): “With the electric trains you get a quieter, cleaner, more reliable and much cheaper train which benefits passengers and it also benefits the taxpayers because it’s much cheaper to keep an electric railway going”.
The news will be exciting for people who like trains. It is generally accepted that the British really need to move from road to rail – but some might argue how it can reasonably be achieved when the cost of travelling on the train system is comparable to that of using a car. When private companies run these systems it might be argued that the focus is on short term profit rather than long term advances in public transport.
Can private enterprise really bring about the technological improvements required to give Britain the sophisticated transport system is needs? If you look at al the big developments in transport, they are catalysed by government. The tilting train that graces so many of our train lines was actually an invention of the then state-owned British Rail. Margaret Thatcher took the decision to scrap BR’s attempts to develop the tilting train – and forced it sell the concept to an Italian firm.
Now the Italians, having perfected the tilting system, are essentially selling us back our own invention. The point is that only large scale state funding can really advance transport. Would Concorde have ever existed if it wasn’t backed up by the British and French governments?
