The editor has asked me to look to the future. This is to mark the fact that the railways are celebrating their 200th anniversary – actually I think 2030 is a better date given the importance of the Liverpool & Manchester rather than the ramshackle Stockton & Darlington and but we won’t go there.
In reality trying to work out what the railways will be like in 200 years when our great grandchildren will all be dead is actually impossible. Just try to think what Edward Pease and his fellow quakers would think if they hopped down from heaven and took a look round at how their project had turned out. Much of today’s railway would in fact be familiar to them, not least the 4ft 81/2 ins gauge. Trains still run on metal wheels running on metal tracks, carriages still transport people, goods travel in wagons and they are more economic than other forms of carrying goods. OK, trains are rather bigger and faster, they have lots of equipment which would bemuse Pease and he would find the scale of the network absolutely bewildering. Nevertheless, they have survived because they have lots of advantages in the best things they do – heavy freight especially over long distances, inter city travel, suburban commuting – over other modes. There is little to suggest that even in 200 years’ time those advantages will not still pertain as they have over the past two centuries
So all I dare predict about 2225 is that railways will still exist. They are likely to be faster, more efficient and even safer than today, but that enduring technique of using metal – now steel – wheels on steel rails will endure. Indeed, I suspect many of the technologies being promoted or tried today will not become ubiquitous. Maglev, in particular, is an honourable failure, even in its 2.0 version, hyperloop, once so extensively touted by that farcical speed freak Elon Musk. Those maglev coaches which were promised to travel the 400 miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles in under an hour are never going to run. Not only are there seemingly insuperable technical difficulties, maglev trains require vast quantities of energy, can’t operate on routes requiring many junctions and are vulnerable in the case of collisions. They certainly do not represent the future.
Nor do hydrogen trains whose economics, again, simply does not stack up and are dubious from an environmental point of view because of the difficulty of obtaining so-called green hydrogen cheaply. Don’t, by the way, think that there is any ‘sustainable’ alternative to aviation fuel (listen to my podcast Calling All Stations series 2, episode 9 for a very good debunking of the idea), another technological development that will not revolutionise transport in 200 years time. Nor, frankly will our great great great grandchildren be getting drone deliveries if they live in a city. Drones are very bad at knocking on doors or, indeed, at flying around lots of people and obstacles. As for flying taxis, they are called helicopters and banned from town centres. And look where 20 years of driverless cars and hundreds of billions of dollars has ended up – a few robotaxis in a handful or American cities at permanent risk of being banned if they cause a fatal accident.
You can begin get the gist of where this is going. Look at those oft screened scenes from of the centre of London 100 years ago – there are buses, cars, bicycles, motor cycles and trams and it is only the horses that have disappeared from our streets. Yes, I know, we don’t have a lot of trams in London any more, but other cities do and we should have. Trains may no longer be powered by coal and steam, but the stations in these clips are just as full today as they were then.
So by and large, our forebears will not be flying around towns and cities using magic power packs on their backs as my childhood comics suggested. Instead, they will be taking the train for work and leisure, though if present trends continue more for the latter than the former. Sure, those trains will be sleek and silent, elegant and economic, but they will still have bogies, windows, doors, tho maybe not a driver in the cab. That’s why we should all keep on campaigning. The railways we get restored will be there just as the Liverpool & Manchester mostly still is.