Limiting Factors
Old habits die hard. I still keep looking at my life as an engineer might. I have been driving to and fro between home and Blandford Forum these past few days, visiting a couple of houses where I have been felling Leylandii, uprooting ivy, and putting in new fencing posts and panels. It ought to be a pleasant enough journey, fifteen miles each way through the beautiful rolling hills of North Dorset, with a choice of two roads to take, a high road and a low road.
The low road, as it nears Blandford, runs close to the trackbed of an old railway, lifted years ago now. It was called the Somerset and Dorset, and it was one of those cross-country routes destined to be closed because it did not fit into the vision of swift inter-city transport that British Rail, as they were called then, were entranced by. It didn't go to anywhere big or bustling, or come from anywhere important. It started down at Wimborne, in Dorset, some distance away from Poole, and ran to Bath, in Somerset, some distance away from Bristol. Now, the derelict hedges and earthworks run alongside the crowded country roads that I am trying to use to get around between home and jobs.
My limiting factor appears to be mobility. It has taken me forty minutes to travel the fifteen miles between home and Blandford, because of the holdups. The roads, both high and low, are too narrow for the heavy lorries that are traveling each way, and when two of them coming in opposite directions approach each other, they have to slow to a crawl in order to pass without either scraping each other, or scraping the houses and hedgerows either side of the road. Two spots on the two roads I can choose each have 20 mph limits on them to try and reduce the number of incidents where lorries and coaches have met each other in the past. And, of course, there are the ever-present tractors to dodge around or follow haplessly when the bends make overtaking impossible.
The railways, when they arrived after the Napoleonic wars, revolutionised this country. The narrow country roads had become clogged with stage coach and carrier traffic which, meeting in the lanes, were often forced to a crawl in order to try and squeeze past each other without causing damage either to the vehicles or to the houses and hedges either side. The rutted and potholed surfaces enforced a maximum speed limit without the need for cameras and policemen. In an effort to speed up the transportation of goods and passengers, some enterprising individuals opened toll roads, purpose built highways without the width restriction and poor surfaces, allowing higher average speeds to be achieved, but only by paying to use them. The system had only limited success, because the toll roads were scattered, and could only be reached by traveling through the free but impeded public roads.
And now the railways have shrunk to nothing but dim memories and small preserved examples, which can only be visited by traveling to them an these narrow, potholed, and overcrowded public roads. Paradoxically, these preserved railways have become very popular, and at least one of them has been extended so that visitors to it will soon be able to travel by train instead of by car to ride the Purbeck line.
The Somerset and Dorset, whose tree-lined relics I have been gazing longingly at from inside the car, features in the latest computer simulation, or game, let's not try and hide the fact that we are only playing. EA Games released Rail Simulator a few weeks ago, and it included half of the SDJR, or S&D, as the line was known, with a couple of steam engines to run along it from Bath to Templecombe. One of the scenarios in the game is called Swift and Delightful, although to most people sixty years ago, the Somerset and Dorset was known as the Slow and Dirty. The quirky initials did not help it to survive when the nationalised railway split itself up internally into regions. The S&D cut across two of them, causing a bit of a headache to the planners and namers, who nowadays we tend to call facilitators and enablers, and the simplest solution seemed to be to close it. Another small line with equally quirky initials, the Shropshire and Montgomeryshire, also closed, but again, mainly on 'economic' grounds, nothing to do with it being known as the S&M.
The railways just didn't make the sort of profit that private companies were able to make on the roads. Profit, for a government, means taxation, which is the life-blood of any party in power, and the railways had been sucked dry by the war and subsequent prevarication over whether to go for all electric, all diesel, or dirty old steam. I make this point about profit and taxation because it is obvious to me that the move towards charging motorists per mile in order to try and force, sorry, persuade them to forsake the roads for public transport is not going to revolutionise personal mobility in this country, certainly not in quite the same way as the coming of the railways did. And taking the case of someone like myself, public transport would not get me to and from my customers. Unless, of course, like the modern railway network believes, we all live in major conurbations conveniently close to the stations.
In a desperate move to try and modify the limiting factor on the motorways, the government this week formally declared the experiments with using the emergency hard shoulders of motorways as extra lanes a success. Modern cars, possibly more reliable than their counterparts of the fifties and sixties when the motorways were built, are far less likely to break down, so there is less need for an emergency lane to deal with problems of stationary vehicles. Let the lanes be used for moving vehicles instead, albeit at a reduced speed, as a concession to safety. More of this innovative (sic) thinking will follow. I can see that, in towns where the single or two-lane roads cannot be widened, one way of reducing the limiting factor on transportation will be to allow cars to use the pavements in busy periods. After all, we are a nation heading rapidly towards obesity, mainly because too many of us walk too little, so why not use that wasted space and create a few more happy smiling faces behind the steering wheels?
I'm not joking.
The low road, as it nears Blandford, runs close to the trackbed of an old railway, lifted years ago now. It was called the Somerset and Dorset, and it was one of those cross-country routes destined to be closed because it did not fit into the vision of swift inter-city transport that British Rail, as they were called then, were entranced by. It didn't go to anywhere big or bustling, or come from anywhere important. It started down at Wimborne, in Dorset, some distance away from Poole, and ran to Bath, in Somerset, some distance away from Bristol. Now, the derelict hedges and earthworks run alongside the crowded country roads that I am trying to use to get around between home and jobs.
My limiting factor appears to be mobility. It has taken me forty minutes to travel the fifteen miles between home and Blandford, because of the holdups. The roads, both high and low, are too narrow for the heavy lorries that are traveling each way, and when two of them coming in opposite directions approach each other, they have to slow to a crawl in order to pass without either scraping each other, or scraping the houses and hedgerows either side of the road. Two spots on the two roads I can choose each have 20 mph limits on them to try and reduce the number of incidents where lorries and coaches have met each other in the past. And, of course, there are the ever-present tractors to dodge around or follow haplessly when the bends make overtaking impossible.
The railways, when they arrived after the Napoleonic wars, revolutionised this country. The narrow country roads had become clogged with stage coach and carrier traffic which, meeting in the lanes, were often forced to a crawl in order to try and squeeze past each other without causing damage either to the vehicles or to the houses and hedges either side. The rutted and potholed surfaces enforced a maximum speed limit without the need for cameras and policemen. In an effort to speed up the transportation of goods and passengers, some enterprising individuals opened toll roads, purpose built highways without the width restriction and poor surfaces, allowing higher average speeds to be achieved, but only by paying to use them. The system had only limited success, because the toll roads were scattered, and could only be reached by traveling through the free but impeded public roads.
And now the railways have shrunk to nothing but dim memories and small preserved examples, which can only be visited by traveling to them an these narrow, potholed, and overcrowded public roads. Paradoxically, these preserved railways have become very popular, and at least one of them has been extended so that visitors to it will soon be able to travel by train instead of by car to ride the Purbeck line.
The Somerset and Dorset, whose tree-lined relics I have been gazing longingly at from inside the car, features in the latest computer simulation, or game, let's not try and hide the fact that we are only playing. EA Games released Rail Simulator a few weeks ago, and it included half of the SDJR, or S&D, as the line was known, with a couple of steam engines to run along it from Bath to Templecombe. One of the scenarios in the game is called Swift and Delightful, although to most people sixty years ago, the Somerset and Dorset was known as the Slow and Dirty. The quirky initials did not help it to survive when the nationalised railway split itself up internally into regions. The S&D cut across two of them, causing a bit of a headache to the planners and namers, who nowadays we tend to call facilitators and enablers, and the simplest solution seemed to be to close it. Another small line with equally quirky initials, the Shropshire and Montgomeryshire, also closed, but again, mainly on 'economic' grounds, nothing to do with it being known as the S&M.
The railways just didn't make the sort of profit that private companies were able to make on the roads. Profit, for a government, means taxation, which is the life-blood of any party in power, and the railways had been sucked dry by the war and subsequent prevarication over whether to go for all electric, all diesel, or dirty old steam. I make this point about profit and taxation because it is obvious to me that the move towards charging motorists per mile in order to try and force, sorry, persuade them to forsake the roads for public transport is not going to revolutionise personal mobility in this country, certainly not in quite the same way as the coming of the railways did. And taking the case of someone like myself, public transport would not get me to and from my customers. Unless, of course, like the modern railway network believes, we all live in major conurbations conveniently close to the stations.
In a desperate move to try and modify the limiting factor on the motorways, the government this week formally declared the experiments with using the emergency hard shoulders of motorways as extra lanes a success. Modern cars, possibly more reliable than their counterparts of the fifties and sixties when the motorways were built, are far less likely to break down, so there is less need for an emergency lane to deal with problems of stationary vehicles. Let the lanes be used for moving vehicles instead, albeit at a reduced speed, as a concession to safety. More of this innovative (sic) thinking will follow. I can see that, in towns where the single or two-lane roads cannot be widened, one way of reducing the limiting factor on transportation will be to allow cars to use the pavements in busy periods. After all, we are a nation heading rapidly towards obesity, mainly because too many of us walk too little, so why not use that wasted space and create a few more happy smiling faces behind the steering wheels?
I'm not joking.
Labels: driving on the hard shoulder
posted by Sopwith-Camel | 8:54 pm
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