The Ballad of Casey Jones

I was in the Colindale newspaper library today doing a bit of research for a decorating project, and in one of the periodicals I was browsing there was the banner headline ' London hit by rail strike, thousands struggle to get home'. The date was 1962. Here we are nearly 50 years on and the same thing is happening today and tomorrow as the tube unions call a 48 hour strike. They seem to be the only group of individuals who regularly disrupt the lives of Londoners these days, and I suspect they do more economic damage that any partial close down forced on us by terrorism or other service interference.

What do they hope to gain? They are clearly not a happy lot or they would have negotiated a stable set of terms the last time they called a strike. This time there is an underlying disciplinary problem which the unions seem keen to force Transport for London to back down on. It is encouraging that they are not, and while joe public is unlikely to know all the ins and outs of the matter, discipline in a service which has so many peoples fate in their hands, needs to be absolutely blemish free. Go get 'em Boris!!

On the way home, as I was sitting at Finchley Road and Frognal station, a goods train rumbled through the station. it was a fairly bland diesel loco pulling an array of similarly bland open topped coal trucks. It made me wonder where all the wonderful customised trucks which used to carry all kinds of produce around the Country have gone. They are probably only preserved in our children's toy train sets, and most of the produce is now transported around the place via the motorway network. Beeching has a thing or two to answer for, and if you are not sure what, here it is in a nutshell......

The effects of the Beeching cuts on the railways over the period 1962-1968 were as follows:-

Staff employed reduced from 500,000 to 300,000
Route miles reduced from 17,000 to 13,000
Number of stations reduced from 5,000 to 2,700
Locomotives reduced from 14,000 to 5,000 (including the changeover from steam to diesel and electric)
Carriages reduced from 36,000 to 20,000
Wagons reduced from 900,000 to 450,000 (including new vehicle types)
Train miles reduced from 335,000,000 to 250,000,000