Not motoring
University challenge
Gavin Stamp
Well, I would still rather go by train whizzing along the Great Western main line and then on the branch to Oxford, crossing and recrossing and recrossing the Thames — but the plain fact is that the coach service has its merits. The journey takes longer, of course, and is subject to the vagaries of traffic jams. But the service is infinitely more frequent and in many ways more convenient. Victoria coach sta- tion is rather more central than Paddington and although Oxford railway station is clos- er to the centre than Sancton Woods brick arcade at Cambridge — where the universi- ty kept the railway at bay — it is not so pleasant a place to arrive as the bus station at Gloucester Green.
Above all, of course, there is the matter of cost. A return ticket to Oxford by the `tube' costs less than half of the railway fare. No wonder Oxford residents assume you have come into money if you visit them by train. Britain, as we all know, can boast the most expensive train fares in the world. And the service to Oxford is typical of all that is wrong with our railway system. Instead of providing a fast and efficient and frequent service to London such as the very nature of the infrastructure allows and making it cheap — the rail companies His Master's Noise.' have virtually given up. Of course it is unfair that, whereas the railway has to be maintained largely out of revenue raised from tickets, the coach companies can use roads lavishly funded by central govern- ment. But there is more to it than that.
The failure of the railway to Oxford to compete with coaches, the failure to pro- vide cheap and efficient public transport, is the legacy of decades of mediocre, intro- verted, defeatist management by British Rail compounded by the blinkered policies of successive governments — both Conser- vative and Labour — in thrall to the road lobby. In Oxford, it is true, there are spe- cial historical circumstances to consider as well. The Great Western behaved badly, allowing a temporary timber shack to serve the ancient university city for over a centu- ry — Max Beerbohm described it as 'that antique station which . . . does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantment of the Middle Age' — but the British Rail rebuilding was not much better — Pevsner considered it 'not a worthy approach to Oxford either'. Now Oxford station has been revamped again but to resemble a shopping centre, while the passenger alight- ing on the down platform still has to go through a dismal subway to reach the exit.
This is one example of the lack of imagi- nation — the lack of any real sense of what a railway is about — as well as the defeatism and sheer stupidity which has for long characterised the running of railways. I remember the 1960s when steps would be taken to conceal the very existence of cer- tain services, so traffic would diminish and the line could be closed. But, even in the last, dying days of British Rail, a decision could be taken, say, to combine the Glas- gow and Edinburgh sleeper services in one train by cutting down on the number of berths and by abolishing the coaches with cheaper sit-up seats — thus obliging stu- dents to travel to Scotland by coach. In whose interest was that, other than the coach companies? Such decisions were cer- tainly not in the national interest.
Of course, things are now getting better. There is a renaissance under way even on Britain's railways as the pleasures and virtues of rail travel are rediscovered. But we still have a long way to go, as a very fair and intelligent recent BBC 2 programme, Traffic, recently emphasised. First, equiva- lent commuter journeys into London and Paris were compared — the British service emerging as slower and much less pleasant owing to overcrowding as well as, naturally, infinitely more expensive. And then a TGV run to Montpelier was compared with King's Cross to Edinburgh. The Great North Eastern Railway — the one great success story of privatisation — came very well out of this even though the journey of equivalent distance took rather longer. But what really emerged is that even the best train operators are hampered not only by decades of underinvestment but also by cur- rent inhibiting policies by government. GNER would like to invest in more trains, but cannot unless the government extends its franchise. In the end, every- thing comes back to government. The French subsidise and promote their rail- way system. In Britain, however, for all the wishful thinking about an integrated trans- port system, the present government so far just seems to be in the bad old tradition, always appeasing the car-owner, always finding money for roads and starving the railways of investment. For all the talk of being European, when it comes to trans- port Mr Blair seems content for us to be like the United States.
Even now, however, it would be possible to do something about the railway service to Oxford and, in an ideal world, there could be frequent trains not just to Paddington but to, say, Oxford Circus if Crossrail was ever built. I really do not want to go by the Oxford 'tube' again but, unfortunately, I am not a millionaire. I blame the government.
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