threat to heritage railways?

In climate terms, coal is the most damaging fossil fuel there is, and despite all the assertions from industry and government, the "carbon capture and storage" technology required to make coal "clean" does not exist.

What do you think? Do pure heritage railways using steam have any future? Please post comments in the comments section!

electric cars - the next con

So everyone is now talking about electric cars, that they are going to save the world! This is hilarious. The worst thing is that Gordon Brown et al keep explaining that this is to control CO2 emissions, no mention of Peak Oil!

The fact is that to switch all the UK's cars to electric power - which is after all what these idiots are proposing - will require current UK electricity generating capacity to increase FOURFOLD. (Source Analysis commissioned by CBT from Keith Buchan of the Metropolitian Transport Research Unit) This does not take into account the embedded energy also required to build these vehicles. Not even the greenest hippy would claim that renewables could supply even a tiny percentage of this increase so where is the only place it could come from? Coal. Great news for the pits of North Somerset but very bad news for the climate.

These odd ideas will fall one by one as the seriousness of the energy crunch comes clear to even the most befuddled politician. We need to constantly argue the case for rail, to stress how much more energy efficient it is (ironically 400%), and to point out that once a line is in place almost all the income is profit. The Americans and continental Europeans understand this, particularly with regard to freight, it will not be that long before our dull lot realise it too. But a little bit of lobbying and information thrown their way won't hurt either!

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peak oil and the new S&D

(Bottom three photos courtesy Mick Knox).

Peak Oil is a worldwide issue but I think all any of us can do is concentrate on how it will affect us, our family, our community and our area.

The New Somerset and Dorset Railway is probably the first railway business in the UK to have Peak Oil as its principal raison d'etre.

I've just been reading Matt Simmons superb book 'Twilight in the Desert', a technical analysis of the prospects for Saudi oil production. It is a very sobering read and even if you take a more optimistic view Saudi oil production is already in decline, with no real prospects of new oil finds coming on line. Saudi Arabia is by far the world's biggest oil producer, when it begins to fail we all do. Notice how keen Saudi Arabia was to reduce oil production recently, claiming it was to force up the price (which didn't happen). It is far more likely that they are trying to rest their oil wells. Rapid production often leads to a larger percentage of unrecoverable oil.

Few people now dispute Peak Oil theory, oil is a finite resource and what's left (less than half) is running out quickly. But you still hear a lot of uninformed people blithely claiming science will 'save' us. Ask for sources or more info and they look blank. It won't. Science itself depends on cheap energy to make much of science possible. Hydrogen? Not a chance. It's not a fuel, it's a delivery method. Biofuels? A total joke and now being abandoned everywhere. All it does is compete with scarce land for food. Electric vehicles? How exactly will we generate the extra electricity to power all these inefficient vehicles? Nuclear power? Okay for a few more decades, but uranium is rapidly depleting with even the best estimates only giving it 60 more years before the lot has gone.

It may be that some of these technologies will fill some of the energy gap, but not enough. It is almost certain that in the future we will need to manage on a lot less energy. Things will get simpler but harder. We will get rid of most of the nonsense that currently blights us!

The one thing that will certainly happen is that transport will switch totally away from roads to railways/tramways, to bikes, to horses and walking. But rail will be the only high-tech option remaining.

Towns and cities will reorientate themselves so that rail becomes the prime mode of medium to long distance travel. Businesses needing transport will relocate alongside railways and tramways. Farming will become 100% organic (all fertilizers are made from oil, so will at first become expensive, then unavailable). Farmers will need to transport surplus product to market, probably no further than ten to twenty miles, by rail mainly. Most people will work from home or at most at a small business in their own town or village. There may be some residual commuting flows to serve a much smaller bureaucracy, but nothing like what we see today. People will holiday mainly in their own country (although hopefully a high speed European rail network should replace the dying air routes), nearly all holidaymakers will travel by train. Roads themselves will quickly vanish as the cost of repair quickly outstrips the availability of money from a falling motoring tax take.

For the New S&D this will mean concentrating on providing mainly local passenger services, but also faster services bringing holidaymakers from further afield to Bournemouth and beyond. Freight will be commonplace, with both local (to market) traffic and through traffic, taking up at least some of the slack from the end of road transport. We may even see renewed coal flows from the mines in North Somerset. People will still want to get about, I can't see us all withdrawing to our villages! There will be plenty of private sidings running into business areas, tram feeders in Bath, Bristol and Bournemouth and probably branch lines linking the classic S&D with villages and towns currently not served by rail.

This is not really a radical vision of the future, merely a realistic one. But it will inform the progress and detail of the New S&D.