I commuted into London by train for 20-odd years. I have not words to express how shit it was.
And *that's* why it was shit. The railways have no competition in that market, so they can treat you however they please in the sure and certain knowledge that the vast majority of people have no choice. The day I stopped commuting and no longer had to hand over huge quantities of taxed income to those heavily subsidised filth was one of the great days of my life.
Only when you don't have to get anywhere at any particular time.
Can you list more than a couple of UK commercial operations that have been going long term and for a decent period into the future ?
Hardly any in the UK and even in places like France where the Canals were capable of taking larger craft there has been a fall off of commercial traffic. The French Freycinet std introduced in the
1870's allowed craft to carry about 300 tons, a UK narrow boat carries about 30. Both still require the same amount of people to crew of two at a minimum to maintain progress and it will take days to say travel from Birmingham to London. You might as well pay one lorry driver to shift that 30 tons in half a day , in 3 days he will have shifted 90 tons compared to the 30 of the double manned boat.
UK Canals were on the whole small affairs as without a large hinterland without water providing geography such as the Alps there was not enough water available to construct them larger and deeper.Back pumping was and is used but that is another cost. The remnants of commercial traffic on inland waterways are carried on navigation's that have special circumstances such as the Manchester Ship Canal which after years in the doldrums is seeing an increase in use under the present ownership who are promoting it again.
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The other navigation that sees regular commecrcial traffic of significance is the lower part of the Sheffield and South Yorkshire which was modernised and enlarged at great expence in the 1980's, just in time for the industrial decline of the region and the move away from coal to set in . Although it does carry some commercial traffic it is a fraction of what the improvement works were supposed to attract and the investment was probably not worth making. Other parts of the system just tend to have short term operations often heralded as a new dawn for a particular canal only to cease operation after a short period.
snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk laid this down on his screen :
I'm too busy to research it, but I know the Leeds / Hull canal still carries some large commercial traffic through Castleford, because I see some of it. Certainly the traffic would not pay for their building now, but they are there, built and available to use.
That will be the Aire and Caulder navigation which is a navigation created from making the river Caulder to Castleford navigable rather than a canal dug through virgin land. Like the Sheffield and South Yorkshire to which it has a link it is one of the few navigations which had investment put into it to enable reasonable sized craft to use it. 600 tons to Castleford, large by UK standards but small by continental standards. The closure of Ferrybridge C power station to which the coal was carried by the navigation removed its main traffic, since then other operations have come and gone but are only a few movements a week ,back in February there was publicity about another new traffic flow.
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which say that there will now be 3 boats working regularly on the waterway. That's like getting excited that the M6 is seeing a couple of hundred lorries a week.
We'll have to agree to differ. Just trying to remember when I commuted into London, by train. 70-74 then 89-02. Always to East Herts or North Essex. The other years, I commuted by car, relatively locally. One of the pleasures of commuting by train was having the time to read a daily paper cover to cover. OTOH, commuting by car meant listening to R4 in the mornings. Can't have both.
I have never been a rail commuter, because rail simply would not have worked for my work trips at all, far too much to take with me and I needed a vehicle with me when there. So all of my rail use has been leisure purposes and rare, but those trips were a pleasure.
Going back a few years I worked for a large organization based in W London. Few lived locally, so most came by car or PT. And those who came by car were far more likely to arrive late.
Railways are likely to be even more suitable for bulk loads. Especially at night when there is less passenger traffic. The reasons railways superseded canals are still true today.
Only because the private company had spent loads of money on it, and at the end of the day, it doesn't have much competition, apart from EasyJet and the like.
Leave it under state control for about 20 years and the rot and underinvestment and inevitable union interference will put it back to square 1.
Remember, Bliar, Hewitt and Byers stole Railtrack from it's shareholders and created Network Rail, a 'not for profit' company which after about 3 years and having borrowed many billions (off the PSBR), announced a 'profit' and used that as justification for million pound bonuses for its chairman and all his socialist cronies.
If you took over Apple right now without compensation you would earn a massive stream of profits thanks to the efforts of the previous 20 years in private hands.
The GPO were there to serve themselves. 'Customers' were always made to feel that they should be proud to grovel and be told 'sorry we haven't got any pairs, you'll have to wait 3 years' when they applied to have a phone installed.
Now, thanks to private initiative and investment alone, you can commute by train and listen to R4 on your smartphone all the way.
I'll bet that if you tried that journey now during the rush hour you would probably have to stand the whole way and not be able to read a paper because of the crush of people around you, who will be reading the same paper on their iPads for free.
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