Der Fliegende Iain Dale

As an illustration of the quite barmy softness of the current UK London Media elite and sadly almost all the rest of us I quote below an item on Sunday 18th July from the web site of Iain Dale’s Diary.

He did not have to worry about connecting flights or awkward rail journeys to get home. Despite this, we have a cry of woe, thrice woe, below, about the desperate hardships of travel today. Yet he is travelling in comfort from Heraklion Airport in Crete, an island in the Eastern Mediterranean to England, crossing two seas and many mountains.

How long and how difficult might such a journey have been for earlier generations and at how much cost? For rather less than an average weekly wage he is winged around 1700 miles home in under half a day including a slight delay and a wait for the luggage. In 2010 the real cost is a fraction of that of 1980.

It is a marvel of commercial organisation and work, once an impossible dream. The way things are going it may soon become one again.

Quote

Amateur Night Flight - Iain Dale 4:24 AM

It seems that the combination of Easyjet and the new operators of Gatwick Airport is a lethal one. And it's not an experience I shall be repeating in a hurry. Our flight back to Gatwick from Heraklion was supposed to take off at 11.15 last night. It took off at 1.30am.

When we got to Gatwick at 3.30 after a four hour flight we had to wait 20 minutes for buses. And now, at 4.30ish we have just been told that we will have to wait at least an hour and a half for our baggage, along with the other 8 Easyjet flights which have arrived late.

If we'd paid £20 for our flights you might think we ought not to complain, but they cost over £300 each. I've had better treatment in third world airports than this. The new operators of Gatwick Airport, whoever they are, ought to be ashamed of themselves. There. I feel better having got that off my chest.

Unquote

I wonder how Iain may have enjoyed spending quality time at Heraklion Airport in May 1941 with the 14th Infantry Brigade? It would certainly have been lively.

May I recommend he reads Evelyn Waugh’s Trilogy “Sword of Honour” Part 2 “Officers and Gentlemen”.

The character of Corporal-Major Ludovic comes to mind.

Keep Right On To The End Of The Road

My back hurts a lot. It has been Heritage Open Days weekend and I was dragged out to look at high cost facilities preserved to remind us of our past. There are many wonderful places, and little known treasures to be found, but there are temptations to the urge to debate. As someone who thinks that Thomas Becket had it coming, it can make me an unwelcome guest at a place where the devout pray to him. When they remind me that he scattered silver coins to the poor pilgrims I remind them that it was the equivalent of chucking £50 notes at football supporters and the money had been obtained by monastic financial and property frauds, malpractices and tax swindles imposed by him as Chancellor. Reginald Fitz Urse, whose manor and lands at Wrotham lay halfway between palaces of the Archbishop in Otford and Maidstone, and had suffered, was responding as any hard pressed tax payer would at the time. King Henry II simply wanted to have a look at the accounts. But it is difficult telling worshippers not to be judgemental.

Which brings me to the money and the roads. The places we visited could be reached by “B” roads at best, and more often by distances over Unclassified (back) roads. It was rough riding, and the roads reminded me of the days when I first cycled when rural roads might have little more than a spray of tar and gravel over limited or negligible foundations. Our car has decent suspension, and comfortable seats, but it was doing a lot of bouncing. This happened on stretches of “A”, trunk roads as well and we have noticed that many of these are in poor condition. Moreover, our journeys were in areas near to towns, motorways or dual carriageway major routes, and busy railway lines. There is a high density of population, and none of it can be regarded as “remote”.

As traffic levels have increased; with increased intensity of vehicle use, the roads need a great deal more expensive maintenance. Also, the vehicles have changed. Not only are cars often heavier, and driven harder, but the commercial vehicles now common are in a different order to those when these roads were first engineered to deal with the traffic of the middle decades of the 20th Century. They are bigger, heavier, and carry more, whether trucks or vans, and modern logistics means that they travel widely and are not confined to motorways or major trunk routes.

A neighbour and good friend was a road engineer. The houses on the development had a few paving slabs as drives, thrown down just before the builders went into liquidation, so many chose to lay new drives. Workmen would spend a couple of days putting down a driveway. My neighbour did his own, and was taking a long time, and doing a very different job. I asked why. He had worked on some major road projects and explained the basic principles of road foundations. There were plenty of good examples around.

When the M62 was built, largely at the urging of Barbara Castle who had been talking to road engineers but to the derision of the Ministry of Transport planners and statisticians, much of the carriageway was laid to motorway standard near major towns. It was expected to function as a series of linked by-passes, but on other stretches, notably the East Riding section beyond the A1, for reasons of economy, the Ministry decided on having limited foundations against advice. The engineers were proved right, the M62 soon achieved high levels of heavy freight traffic, and in the East Riding the foundations quickly began to collapse and the whole section had to be rebuilt to much higher standards, at a huge added cost.

One feature explained to me that was when foundations became deformed and the surface uneven, then vehicles would “thump” up and down. With ordinary cars this was not much of an issue, but with anything heavy and with high axle weights, this would worsen the damage, and at an increasing rate. I could believe it, as once I had the job of diverting an Armoured Brigade of four regiments moving on its tracks down a side road, and inside a couple of hours the road and its foundations were torn apart and up to two foot taken off the level. Unless dealt with early a roadway under continuing pressure could collapse quickly, and sometimes without notice. Any services underneath would be damaged and liable to failure.

We are talking serious money. A back of the envelope calculation for the few miles I spent driving around a varied collection of back roads, “B” roads, and the few miles of “A” roads, would mean around £100 million to reconstruct them to modern needs, taking account of the range, weight, and intensity of vehicle traffic they now have. For the county as a whole, call it at least a billion. It could be needed soon, because some of these roads are deteriorating fast. In many cases the verges have gone and the edges are already collapsed. The potholes are getting bigger and deeper. If we ever do get a hard winter again the frost damage will be extensive. Surfaces are eroding fast, and fracture lines are common. The rutting that is now common shows a great many foundations are impaired. As other routes become clogged or under repair, many of these roads are experiencing not just local traffic but a good deal of incidental other traffic.

One thing is clear, it is that routine road maintenance, as well as much else that is “routine” in central and local government, has not seen its expenditure keep pace either with basic needs, advancing costs, or increased demand. Bitter experience of budgeting tells me that one of the first, often the first, casualty of retrenchment, cuts, or discarded plans, is maintenance and upkeep. If you do not do the basic work, and are late in dealing with worsening issues, then you can finish up with something that is no longer serviceable. Our road system beyond the motorways and major trunk routes is already in an advancing stage of decline. This is being written by someone who visits preserved railways and has all the ancient prejudices in favour of rail.

If you want to understand the thinking, then go to a heritage site which has ancient ruins. When I try to explain to those who love these places and their myths that it was the maintenance costs that did for most of them they do not believe me. Consider the state of the Exchequer over much of the past, the problems with taxation, and just how much it cost to maintain such places for so few people. It applied to the castles and to a great many other major constructions of the middle ages. Moreover the urge to build new prestige buildings added to all the burdens and something had to go.

It is surprising how quickly an infrastructure can collapse. For catastrophe hunters, one sport is trying to guess which advanced economy could be the next to go. At the moment the UK is at shortening odds, so keep your eye on the road.

Sat Nav & GPS - The Organic Option

Fare Dodging For Franchisees

So, let me work this one out. The taxpayer is down for £700 million as a result of the fiasco over the National Express franchise for the East Coast main line. It is said that it grossly overbid for the franchise contract on the basis of annual passenger growth of 9% up to 2015 or whenever. Was that compound I wonder or simple? Or didn’t they get round to that one? Even so, it is a huge increase, obtainable only if prices could be reduced in real terms, if not nominal. But the fares went up, didn’t they, because of the liabilities arising from the auction system and its costs inspired by the government? As well as the restructuring of fares, which amounted to another increase, and the racking up of any additional charges.

The Prime Minister is a man from Fife, National Express is part of a very Scottish company which flits about politically according to where benefit lies, and the Chief Executive of National Express has suddenly left to spend more time with his toy train set. He is a Mr. Bowker, who has a great deal of financial and political experience, but when asked about coupling trains thinks that you are talking about leasing them rather than moving them. Moreover he has hung around with the Blairs, sharing an interest in ancient pop music and imaginative financing.

The way it has worked has been to up the costs of travel, notably to the poorest, pour zillions into the pockets of all the usual financial entities, and put a hefty tax on real travel by rail. From time to time I need to travel by rail, so yet again, I will be paying for all this nonsense. And the reason for the “Flying Scotsman” picture is that once long ago, I worked on a former LNER station where A3 class locomotives were based, including that particular one for a short period.

The men I met then had been there before the nationalisation of 1947, but some before the rationalisation of 1923. They gave a lifetime to the railway, yet they earned less in their working lives than Bowker did in a month.