Madam, - An observer of rail and road freight in Ireland has to express bewilderment and astonishment - bewilderment because in the midst of growing pollution and a crisis of fuel costs, the Minister for Transport is failing to promote rail freight, and astonishment at Irish Rail's deliberate abandonment of container and other viable traffics. (The silence of environmental correspondents in broadsheet newspapers is also baffling.)
In recent months Iarnród Éireann has given up three daily container trains to and from Cork; one train load of cement from Limerick direct to customers at Athy (replaced by 15 road tankers); one freight train to and from Ballina; and one between Dublin and Limerick. North Wall is no longer accessible for rail container traffic and exchanges with ships near the Point Depot and at the terminals called "the Dardanelles" are increasingly difficult. Contrast the lavish expenditure on the load-restricted Dublin Port Tunnel.
The Minister has repeatedly asserted that rail freight - both in wagon loads and in block trains - is "uneconomic", but he and his officials ignore the social implications of his dogmatism: rail freight has an accident rate per tonne-kilometre some one-fifteenth that of road, and road surface wear varies as the fourth power of the axle loading. The fiscal, environmental, and rigidly economic reasons for reversing present rail freight policies are overwhelming. The time for IÉ again to become a serious rail freight operator is now. In transport our national well-being, far from being fostered, is being diminished by lack of thought and failure of political will in the higher strata of government. - Yours, etc,
Prof GEORGE HUXLEY, School of Classics, Trinity College, Dublin 2.