Tracking progress

A POINT OF VIEW By David Cannadine

The state of a nation's railways has always revealed much about the state of the nation.

A few days ago, I received in the mail a brochure about a railway - not from a travel agent, trying to persuade me to journey on luxury trains in Canada or India or China or Australia, but from English Heritage.

Should Brunel's raillway become a world heritage site

It proposes that the great line from London to Bristol, conceived and created by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was born exactly 200 years ago, should be recognised as a World Heritage Site, where it would join such iconic structures as the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China.

Before I go any further, I must declare an interest, which is that I'm a Commissioner of English Heritage. But I had nothing to do with the production of this pamphlet, and I hadn't even seen it before it arrived unexpected and unannounced on my doormat.

In any case, it's no more than a consultation document, but it does make its case very powerfully, and it's easy to see why.

Art of engineering

The London to Bristol line was built between 1836 and 1841, and as befitted an enterprise called from the outset the Great Western Railway, it was conceived in its entirety not only as a work of engineering, but also as a work of art.

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The two terminal stations, at Paddington in London and at Temple Meads in Bristol, are among the finest in the country.

The Maidenhead Bridge and the Wharncliffe Viaduct are astonishing for their audacity and panache - and endurance. And the two mile tunnel under Box Hill in the Cotswolds was a wonder of the world on its completion, adorned with a great classical facade at its western entrance, which provided a fitting approach to the Roman city of Bath.

"In these things," observed Brunel's biographer L.T.C.Rolt in 1957, "we see the monuments of a brief heroic age of engineering as remote from our world as that of the great medieval cathedrals."

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by railways. I was brought up on (among other things), Thomas the Tank Engine, I was the proud possessor of a Hornby clockwork train, and I can still recall the feelings of regret and disappointment that I never graduated to an electric train set.

Among my most vivid boyhood memories are travelling each year from Birmingham to Wales on the Cambrian Coast Express, with its chocolate and cream carriages and its great, polished steam engines: John Major's world before he had ever been heard of.

And when I first visited the United States as a graduate student, in the early 1970s, I journeyed around the whole country by rail, from Chicago to New Orleans to Los Angeles, to Seattle and back to Chicago, on trains bearing such romantic names as the Coast Starlight and the Empire Builder.

War's timetable

They were rarely on time, and occasionally they ran more than a day late; but it was an unforgettable way to get a sense of the vastness and variety of that great country.

Eurostar trains have linked Britain and France

In their heyday, trains were never intended to be just about recreation and romance. They moved people and goods to many different destinations and for many different purposes.

Pioneered in Britain, they had helped unify and consolidate the 19th-Century nation state: not surprisingly, railway timetables were very important to the belligerent powers when war broke out in 1914.

They had also helped hold together massive nations that extended across continents: the United States, Canada, Australia, and most famously in Russia, with its trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok.

They had been instruments of British imperialism: in India, lines criss-crossed the sub-continent, and in Africa, a railway was planned stretching all the way from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope.

And in Argentina, China and the Ottoman Empire, railways were one means by which European powers, especially Britain and Germany, intruded themselves into countries which they never officially ruled but over which they sought to exert influence.

Closed lines

By the time I was growing up, in the 1950s and early 1960s, railways seemed as outmoded as the great European empires, which were then fast dissolving.

Transcontinental lines could not compete with airplanes: Harry Truman's presidential campaign of 1948 had been the last to be waged from the back of a railroad car.

China has been investing heavily in rail technology

And short distance journeys were increasingly made by bus or automobile, as motorways and freeways proliferated across western Europe and north America.

In the United States, the remaining private railway companies were virtually bankrupt, and in Britain, the nationalised network seemed hopelessly uneconomic and out of date.

Dr Beeching would soon wield his famous axe, closing a third of the lines at a stroke, and on both sides of the Atlantic there would be some famous symbolic destructions: of the Doric Arch at Euston in London, and of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in New York. To railway aficionados, it all seemed very depressing.

As Ian Fleming put it in From Russia With Love, published in the same year as Rolt's life of Brunel, "the great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one."

Rail recovery

Yet that was not quite the whole truth. In western Europe, and also in Japan, one essential element of national recovery after the end of the Second World War was the creation of a new railway infrastructure, lavishly funded by the state and based on electric rather than steam power.

Berlin's new main railway station

And there was an international dimension to it as well, as the previously feuding nations of the continent were bound together by new fast trains, linking Zurich and Milan, or Paris and Bonn, called Trans European Expresses.

Since then, most governments in western Europe have retained their commitment to well-funded and well-functioning railways, as exemplified by the new central station in Berlin, opened in May this year.

It cost £490 million to build, it handles 1,100 trains a day, and processes around 300,000 passengers, travelling not only within Germany, but far beyond its borders to the west, south and east.

In Europe, trains are no longer expressions of national assertion, but of trans-national collaboration. Here in Britain, the record has been more mixed: there is a general recognition that trains are better for the environment than cars, and the current reconstruction of the stations at St Pancras and King's Cross is one of the greatest building projects in Europe.

Privatisation

But for all her invocation of "Victorian values", Margaret Thatcher disliked trains, rarely travelled on them, and refused to fund them at the level they needed. And despite John Major's nostalgic attachment to chocolate and cream carriages, rail privatisation during his government was scarcely an outstanding success.

If you can tell a country's commitment to public services by how much it spends on its trains, then Britain scores much higher than the United States, but markedly lower than Japan or western Europe

In the United States, the position is different again. Since 9/11, rail travel along the east coast corridor from Boston to Washington via New York has become more popular than ever.

But the government funded Amtrak Corporation is woefully short of money, and the Bush administration is viscerally hostile to it, and would like to cut its subsidy still further.

Earlier this year, 200 miles of the line south of New York came to a halt because of a power failure, leaving tens of thousands of people stranded in tunnels or between stations for five hours.

It was scarcely a disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, but it was another example of the American paradox that John Kenneth Galbraith termed "private affluence, public squalor".

If you can tell a country's commitment to public services by how much it spends on its trains, then Britain scores much higher than the United States, but markedly lower than Japan or western Europe, where the sophistication and speed of their railways put ours to shame, as anyone knows who's taken the Eurostar from London to Paris.

China's fast track

Yet the pre-eminent railway nation today is not France or Germany or Japan: it's China, which is expanding its network in ways - and for reasons - that have a very 19th-Century feel to them.

It's in the process of raising $250 billion, to add 13,000 miles to its domestic network by 2020, including a new line which will cut the journey time from Beijing to Shanhai from 13 hours to five.

A few months ago, a 1,200 mile railway was opened from Xining in Quinghai province to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. It's an engineering marvel, with tracks laid so high on the roof of the world that oxygen is provided for passengers; but there are also fears that it will increase Chinese control and could spell the end of indigenous Tibetan culture.

And more recently still, China has invested $1.5 billion in railways in Nigeria and Angola: two former European colonies, both with large supplies of oil, which China allegedly covets.

The age of the railway is not yet over. And nor, it seems, is the age of empire. I wonder if Thomas the Tank Engine has yet been translated into Chinese.

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Add your comments on this story, using the form below.

Last weekend my wife and I had to go to London to visit some friends. I thought I would check out the train fares but the cheapest return ticket I could get was over £100. Guess what we did? Took the car of course. Last month I spent a week in Rome, where a week's travel card for both the Metro and bus at any time was 16 Euros -- that would be a 2 day pass in London! How can this government expect us to use 'public transport' when it costs an arm and a leg to do so?
Naim, Wakefield, West Yorkshire

Luebeck in Northern Germany to Rosenheim in Bavaria and back in a day? That's practically from Denmark to Austria... and it can be done by train. Yes - it is a long day out (take sandwiches), but Penzance to Wick and back in a day? You've got to be joking. It's a mark that the other Western Europeans seem to care more, not about anything in particular, but are just more conscientious and operate, simply, on a much higher level than the UK, which puts us to shame.
Alex Staff, Brighton

Britain invented the train yet we have a network that is obsolete and far too expensive. I used the astounding new Berlin station this summer and then King's Cross this weekend. We have a lot of catching up to do. Our governments looked on rail as costly undertaking since the 1950s but Japan and then France proved that high-speed rail could beat cars and planes for inter-city journeys.
Sean O'Conor, London

The fact that, worldwide, decent railway systems can only succeed with the help of massive and continuing government subsidy, only goes to prove that railways are fundamentally economically unviable in comparison with unsubsidised car and 'plane travel. Take away the train subsidies and the car taxes and the trains must cost vastly more per passenger mile. Why should taxpayers money continue to prop up this economic haemorrhage? The US government has got it right - if the railway cannot support itself through the price of its tickets, it does not deserve to survive. Harsh, but fair.
Richard Gosling, Aberdeen

It would be a disaster if the GWR line was granted as a world heritage site. This line badly needs money spent on it to bring it up 21st century standard and the last thing it needs is all the structures along the line being listed thereby making its upgrade very expensive or even prohibitive. The only thing at Paddington that should be retained is the roof. The rest of the station needs to be re-built and modernised in keeping with the needs of the 21st Century.
Andrew, Winchester

If Kinderdijk in the Netherlands can be a world heritage site, then so can this railway.
John Airey, Peterborough

How come the British Railway system today seems to be the most expensive and most rotten transport network in the world? If only the rail travel could be cheaper than some airlines and the cost of driving in and out of London then we would have at least restored the art of pleasant conversation and not a habit of moaning.
Rakesh K. Mathur, London

I was brought up beside the now sadly defunct Waverley Route which ran from Carlisle to Edinburgh. South of Hawick there are several monuments to Victorian engineering such as Shankend viaduct and Whitrope tunnel. South of the tunnel some hardy souls, calling themselves the Waverley Route Heritage Association (WRHA), have taken it upon themselves to try to reinstate the line. Beeching wielded his axe here and in so many other places and we are now reaping the whirlwind with clogged roads and the lack of exercise that using public transport used to afford people. Politicians should get real over railways but unfortunately road vehicles are big business for the Treasury so that's that.
Niall, Dorchester

It's nonsense to say railways are economically unviable - plane and car travel is hugely subsidised, through government-funded infrastructure (roads as one obvious example!), plane fuel being untaxed etc etc.
Jim, Manchester

Why is the UK train system referred to by the Government as "public transport" when it is a privatised industry and can only be afforded by those who have the money to use it? Shouldn't a service for the general public be controlled by the body that is set up to serve that nations interest and welfare? If trains are ever to be preferable to cars, lorries, buses and aircraft in terms of economics and green credentials for moving people and freight safely and efficiently around the UK, then the system would need public support and increased funding and commitment from the Government to demonstrate that there is a future for trains and society in general. Perhaps there is a case for renationalisation after all.
Clive, Orpington

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