All Roads Lead to Carbon Emissions

The Institute of Mechanical Engineers has warned the UK government that there needs to be a “modal shift” from road to rail if the country is to meet targets for cutting emissions in the transport sector.

"We have ambitious government targets for transport emissions, but transport emissions are static," said Cliff Perry, vice president of the Institute's railway division. "Eighty-five percent of transport emissions come from roads, so if we are serious about doing something, we must hit road transport."

Comparisons between emissions from different modes of transport are not straightforward, as engine efficiency, passenger numbers and generation methods for electric trains need to be factored in. However, any idiot except a government minister can see that, on the whole, one 5000hp train carrying 1000 passengers ought to be generating about half the pollution of two hundred 50hp cars each carrying five – or indeed considerably less than a thousand cars containing just the driver, which is what usually happens at peak time.

However, an idiotic government minister pointed out that private rail operators were making an awful lot of money by providing unreliable, overcrowded services, and any attempt to encourage more people onto trains would require them to actually spend some of their huge piles of cash on improving their services - which for some reason they were all unaccountably reluctant to do.

Odd as it may seem, no mention was made of the almost complete abandonment of railfreight services - despite the huge number of lorries clogging up the roads by hauling goods from the four corners of Britain to centralised depots and then redistributing them all over the country again. But presumably that would upset the Road Haulage Association - and Shirley Williiams, the only Transport Secretary to upset the Road Haulage Association since the war, was sacked after calling a halt to Dr Beeching’s wholesale destruction of the rail network in the sixties.

Although that was no doubt a complete coincidence.