Railway journeys

are surely the better way to travel? 

I find it hard to understand why commuters would choose the bus if the train was (a) as close to their departure and destination points, (b) would get them to their destination at the same time but take less time to do it, and (c) cost the same fare.

Now I know that this is far from always being true but it is true of some journeys, especially here in this city.  

I was talking to someone about this a couple of days ago and I have been thinking about since then. 

"But I've always caught the bus Cat," I was told in a puzzled sort of way. 

I tried pointing out that he could leave the house ten minutes later and arrive at work five minutes earlier if he caught the train. Being a suburban train the fare would be exactly the same. I also pointed out that he would simply need to cross one road, using an underpass and walk perhaps a further ten metres at most. 

He shook his head. I gave up. There were other things we needed to discuss more urgently. It still left me bewildered.

I like trains. I can take my tricycle on the train. It means I can actually go somewhere if a train goes there too. Buses are not the same. I have caught a bus twice in the last twenty years - an urgent trip to the hospital to see my father. Now the rail line has been extended to the hospital I would pedal to the closest station and catch the train to the hospital. It would be the safest thing for me to do. Even allowing for pedalling time if I looked carefully at the timetable and planned my journey it would be faster than catching a bus. Buses are slow, especially in peak hour traffic.

And so it is that I wonder why there is so much opposition to extending the railway lines here. Railways are a much more environmentally sound option too. We have one electrified line and another (hopefully) to be completed by the end of the year. The trains on the electrified line are busy. In peak hour they can carry several hundred passengers and they do. Yes, people do use the service.

Governments over the years were short sighted when it came to the railways. They abandoned them. Some of the tracks were taken up and would now have to replaced at a great cost. There is still a mish-mash of gauges here too. The founding fathers should have put their heads together on that one in 1901. 

And I suspect there is another problem. Buses require drivers and once required conductors as well. The union voice about employment was strong. It takes more drivers (and an equal number of conductors in the past) to keep buses on the roads.

But when these people talk about the need to be environmentally aware and perhaps moving to environmentally friendly buses I wonder whether their opposition to trains is based on common sense. 

There was an accident on one of the "freeways" a couple of days ago. It was taking some people more than three hours to travel a distance it normally takes no more than thirty minutes to travel. Complaints were loud and many. My thought was that trains might have reduced the problem to more manageable proportions.

But I know that habits die hard. The man I was talking to will still be catching the bus.