20 – 20 Vision
In my last blog I lamented how Brunel, the great Victorian engineer, had lost the railway “gauge war,” so denying us a track width of seven feet. I also expressed deep regret that the sixties saw the decimation of much of our rail network. Taken together these two points had me wondering how “lorry free” our highways might now be, given that vast railway freight cars could have been taken directly to the middle of just about every major city, town or rural community. From these depots onward distribution would have been but a few miles.
Clearly, with the benefit of hindsight, these could probably be classified as two historical “wrong turns.” Today I was given another pointed reminder, linked to the above, as my twenty mile journey was reduced to nothing better than a crawl, by dozens of heavy goods vehicles seemingly welded together.
Needless to say, at the first sight of a dual carriage way, the driver of a lorry carrying forty tons of high priority dog food lunged onto the outside lane and proceeded to overtake the lorry in front, at a speed differential of half a mile an hour. An act of selfishness that denied scores of following drivers the chance to get by.
Silently fuming, behind the dog food, I reflected that back in the early sixties an uncle of mine was a senior director of the Pressed Steel Company in Oxford. This was the birth place of countless car bodies and, during this period, they developed an ingenious prototype vehicle called a “road railer.” While this was basically a railway freight wagon, it also had a set of road wheels and tyres as well. The logic was simple, goods travelled by rail into town or city freight yards, the road wheels were lowered and the rail wheels retracted. A tractor unit would have then been hooked, so allowing the entire freight wagon to have been driven the short distance to where the goods it contained were required.
Had this well thought out project succeeded, and been allowed to run on the then intact railway system, just imagine how free of heavy traffic our roads would be today? Goods from the Continent could have arrived on “road railers” via the Channel Tunnel, so freeing other road users of from the curse of left hand drive lorries; leviathans where drivers often claim to not always see cars behind or the ones that are overtaking them.
Of course hindsight is 20 / 20 vision, but if only certain brains had been engaged more effectively in the past, how much easier life might of been for all of us car drivers now?
