How the railways will fix the future: rediscovering the essential brilliance of the iron road
Gareth Dennis, Repeater, £10.99

    
IN this splendid book, railway engineer Gareth Dennis urges the vital importance of railways. As he argues, public transport does not need inventing. We’ve solved the technology challenges for urban and long-distance transport, just as we have solved the problems of getting clean water and generating electricity.

We have all the skills and tools we need to solve our problems. All we lack is the political will, not the technological capability. He asks, should the railways be nationalised? And answers, yes, absolutely, but adds that this is only the first small step on a much larger journey. 

The idea that there can be meaningful competition in a complex network like the railways is bizarre. Railways should not be competing with each other. Their real competition is with road and air.

Conventional electrification is the only long-term solution. Hydrogen and battery trains are not efficient or cost-effective over their lifetime. Electrification, resignalling, track renewals, earthworks and drainage, platform and accessibility corrections, all need rolling programmes of work steered by a strategic plan. Rolling programmes are far better for staff than episodic projects: boom and bust largely end; strong teams build up over years; and retaining skills is far easier.

The British railway has shown that a franchised railway system of private operators will ultimately self-destruct. Consortia of banks initially ran the rolling stock leasing companies and sent their profits to tax havens, paying billions to shareholders, while refusing to invest in upgraded track layouts, electrification or modern control systems.

We have also suffered the near death of our train manufacturing industry, as there was no incentive to continue British Rail’s programme of fleet renewals. There is a worldwide lack of capacity to build new rolling stock. Clearly the “free market” cannot meet our needs, so the state needs to fill the gap.

Dennis argues that: “Railways... are the safest and most energy-efficient means of transport we’ve conceived of and likely ever will conceive of.” Across the EU in 2015-19 the risk of death for rail passengers was about 28 times less than for car occupants. These are safety statistics from the International Railway Safety Council.

As he explains, steel wheels on steel rails give significant energy efficiency benefits. In the UK, road transport alone accounts for a quarter of our total emissions, rail for 0.4 per cent. The greenhouse gas emissions of a train journey per passenger mile are a quarter of those of a car journey and a fifth of those of a plane trip.

Railways move more people and more goods with less infrastructure and less land take. One locomotive can haul the equivalent of up to 80 HGVs. A two-track railway can carry ten or 20 times more people per hour than a six-lane motorway. 

Investing in schools results in a benefit, and the investment pays for itself. When our NHS keeps people healthy so they can keep active and working, the return on our investment comes from fewer people having to fall back on social security. When our railway keeps passengers and goods moving more efficiently and keeps the economy more buoyant, it’s worth it.

Yet the Treasury is innately hostile to policies which involve upfront investment for a long-term return. As one ex-mandarin put it: “I was trained to be sceptical of spend-now-save-later proposals.” We need to wrest power away from the Treasury before we abolish it.

History has shown, again and again, that only the collective action of well-organised workers can ensure that decent conditions, pay and safety are maintained. Strong unions achieve better feelings of collective and personal responsibility for safety, as Dennis has observed over the years.

A 2013 study of 31 countries titled Worker Health Is Good For The Economy https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23849285/  found that union density was the most important influence on improving workplace safety, health and GDP. 

This book has a wonderfully positive message for our railways, and a message that applies more widely than the railway: plan for the future, and build the collective power of the working class.