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A Proud British Tradition
gets Shunted Off the Rails
This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
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She used to be an iron horse,
twenty years ago.
Used to bring the mail to me,
through the ice and snow.
I've sat alone and watched her,
steaming through the night.
Ninety tons of thunder,
lighting up the sky.
She was a Princess of the Night
We saw the writing on the wall....
Princess of the Night by Saxon
1981 album Denim and Leather
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Alistair McConnachie writes:
On Saturday 10th January 2004, a historic British tradition ended.
The Night Mail, romanticised by WH Auden's poem, and latterly by British Heavy Metal band, Saxon, in their thundering tribute, Princess of the Night, finally pulled into Penzance, its final stop.
January 10th marked the last journey of the Travelling Post Offices (TPOs), which sorted mail at the same time as carrying it across the country.
And as the Royal Mail Press Office told Sovereignty on the 9th February 2004, while there are still a small number of bags of mail being delivered by rail, the aim is to phase this out completely also, as they "implement a road and air distribution network only, which makes better use of resources and is more cost effective."
It's worth asking why? Rail, surely, is a more "sustainable" form of transport than road or air.
SOME HISTORY ON TRAVELLING POST OFFICES
The first Travelling Post Office in Britain was a converted horsebox that left London for Birmingham on January 20, 1838. By the beginning of the First World War there were 139 TPOs in service, and in the 1930s the Royal Mail made a documentary called "Night Mail" to celebrate the centenary of the TPOs. It concentrated on the London-Scotland run and was shown in cinemas throughout Britain. Benjamin Britten composed the music and WH Auden was commissioned to write his now classic poem.
After the Second World War, however, only 43 trains were in operation, and by 1968 only first-class mail was sorted on the trains.
Latterly there were only 18 TPOs with 420 staff running from Carlisle and Newcastle to Penzance. Annual running costs were £16 million and the Royal Mail claimed it would need a further £30 million to keep them running.
But is it simply a matter of cost-cutting?
Steve Griffith, the Travelling Post Office manager at Stonebridge Park distribution centre, near Harlesden, north London has said: "Our aim is to save £90 million a year by transferring the mail from rail to road and plane. The TPOs were a Victorian answer to a Victorian problem to moving post in a pre-motorway era. But they have become inefficiently priced and the inconsistency of the railways has meant it has been difficult to keep to our target of more than 92.5 per cent of next-day deliveries." (quoted in Adam Edwards, "Last post for the night mail", The Daily Telegraph, 3 January 2004 "weekend" section, pp.1-2)
Certainly, engineering works on the line, and the general poor state of the British railway system can make delivery problematical in those cases where there are delays. However, surely the unpredictable British weather can also cause delays on the roads too!
Sovereignty has been asked whether the decision to remove mail from the rail, may have something to do with European Union directives related around the railways and postal services?
RAILWAYS : DO EU DIRECTIVES DEMAND RAIL PRIVATISATION?
Some euro-sceptics have suggested that privatisation of the railways was mandated by EU Directive 91/440/EEC of the 29th July 1991.
This is not strictly speaking correct. The EU directive does not demand privatisation.
What Directive 91/440 demanded is separate accounting between infrastructure and operations. The aim of the Directive was to "facilitate the adoption of the community railways to the needs of the single market and to increase their efficiency -- by separating the management of railway operation and infrastructure from the provision of railway transport services, separation of accounts being compulsory and organisational or institutional separation being optional ..."
As Dr Denis Cooper pointed out in a letter to the Scotsman on 29 January 2004, "It was the Tories who chose to introduce the 'optional' separation, against all expert advice."
The fact that this Directive does not mandate privatisation is shown by the fact that other countries have not responded to it by privatising their rail networks. As this report from 2000 states:
"One of the principal measures introduced by the Directive is the distinction between the provision of transport services and the operation of infrastructure. The two activities should be separately managed and should have separate accounts, though there is no need to establish formally separate companies. Moreover, access to the national rail network must be permitted to companies from other countries. The Member States had to comply with the Directive's provisions no later than 1 January 1993.
"Subsequently, the processes of liberalisation and privatisation have occurred in each country in quite different ways. The United Kingdom is the sole example of complete privatisation of the sector, even though the railways remain heavily regulated in terms of fares, timetables, ticketing arrangements and standards of reliability and punctuality. In the other EU countries, there are very few instances of privatisation, if any."
POSTAL SERVICES : DOES EU DIRECTIVE 97/67/EC of 15 DECEMBER 1997 DEMAND PRIVATISATION of POSTAL SERVICES?
According to this report:
"The December 1997 EU Directive on postal services (97/67/EC) requires all Member States to guarantee a universal postal service that covers at least the collection, classification, transport and distribution of postal items of up to two kilos and parcels of up to 10 kilos, as well as registered mail and insured-value mail. These requirements cover both domestic services and cross-border services. However, if considered necessary for the efficient operation of the service, Member States may reserve domestic, urgent or ordinary correspondence weighing less than 350 grammes for a commercial operator. The same is true for cross-border mail and direct advertising."
According to the Department of Trade and Industry's (DTI) information on postal services -- where you can also find copies of the full postal directives -- the Postal Services (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 [S.I.2002/3050] modifies certain sections of the Postal Services Act 2000 in order to facilitate full transposition the new European Postal Directive (2002/39/EC) -- this amended Directive (97/67/EC).
The regulations to implement the new Postal Directive were laid before Parliament on 11 December 2002 coming into force on 1 January 2003. The transposed Directive reduced the area that may be reserved from 350g to 100 grams, from 1 January 2003 and will further reduce it to 50grams from 1 January 2006.
While this EU Directive does not demand privatisation of postal services, it does open it up, as an option.
So, is mail by rail incompatible with the EU and UK government's plans for postal privatisation?
Several readers have suggested speculatively that a possible reason mail is being shunted off the rails and onto the roads is because the UK government is intending to open postal services up to privatisation, and it would therefore remain untenable for Royal Mail to continue to enjoy the competitive advantage of delivering mail by rail. Thus, Royal Mail's competitive advantage must be removed. Or perhaps, Royal Mail may indeed consider the mail trains to be a potential financial and physical liability, when faced with more effective road delivery by its competitors....
However, the Royal Mail Press Office told Sovereignty that this "wasn't something we would want to comment on" because as far as they were concerned, "the rationale is simply to ensure an improved distribution network in terms of improved efficiency and cost."
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