Back-hand

Scan page 8

skeleton system linking only a few major cities Horwich and Shildon engineering workshops making 6,000 workers redundant. These cuts were carried out against the backcloth of a reduction of 1000 jobs per month within the industry.

What they really intend to do is to privatise the major Inter-City routes and close down as much of the network as possible.

Recently, even the Tory editor of the Railway Gazette said: "The frightening truth is that the government no longer cares whether the trains go on running or not -so long as railwaymen themselves shoulder the blame if they stop."

You've guessed it. They'll be back-handed to private companies. This is the major factor behind the redundancies in the Engineering Workshops. Hence the Tories are using a number of combined devices to tighten the screw on BR and the unions and prepare the ground for an auction.

Indeed, Sir Alfred Sherman, former Director of the Centre for Policy Studies, told The Guardian recently:

"British Rail mirrors British society. Anachronistic, wasteful, shabby, epileptic, it not only has resisted change but inhibited analysis of the causes of its shortcomings.

"Successive governments have postponed root-andbranch appraisal of the rail problem and instead thrown large amounts of money at it, tens of millions in subsidies and write-offs."

The real roots of collapse, however, stem not from "oversubsidisation" but from under-capitalisation. The story of the Advanced Passenger Train (APT) proves this.

It has had only a measly £43.4 million spent on it over a decade (only 12% of BR investment) and has still to come into service. By contrast, in France the more million grant for the APT when a minimum of £286 million would be needed to build the 60 APTs, together with the new track and rolling stock thought necessary for modernising the Inter-City routes.

The absurd fact is that the APT is a more sophisticated high-technology unit than either the Japanese or French trains. The APT, if mass produced, would sell for £1 million less than the bullet trains.

New train Moreover, Germany is also zooming ahead with its own train and is spending 15.5 million deutsch marks between 1981 and 1990 on buitding 614 kilometres of new track and upgrading 1970 kilometres of existing track for the new train.

In costs alone, the introduction of the APT plus mass electrification would save 700,000 tonnes of fuel annually. Indeed, it is estimated that if all the InterCity routes were electrified, BR would receive an extra £30 million a year in improved passenger business.

These figures come from BR itself.

BR says that for every 1% improvement in journey time, there is a 2% rise in passenger revenue. So work it out.