Page:The Reshaping of British Railways (Beeching Report).pdf/16

 parts of the total traffic mixture are associated with particular routes. It is also necessary to consider the potential effects of improved handling of traffic and the possibilities of attracting more or better traffics.

The extent to which this has been found possible is described in sections which follow.

The distribution of passenger traffic over the routes of British Railways is shown by Map No. 1. Numerous references will be made to this map in.followhg sections, where passenger traffics are considered in the three main groups which have already been referred to, namely:—

indent=2|*Fast and semi-fast train services.

Stopping-train services.

Suburban services.

The characteristics which distinguish these three types of service are clear, even though the groups merge into each other so that sharp boundaries between them can only be drawn arbitrarily.

Fast and Semi-Fast Trains

Fast and semi-fast trains provide inter-city services. They depend, for the attraction of traffic, upon the provision of rapid transits between the centres of population which they serve and upon well-chosen departure and arrival times in relation to the social and business habits of the community. To achieve the speed required they must be limited-stop trains, and to be successful financially they must draw a substantial number of passengers from the cities which they link. In general, the greater the distances covered by such services the more closely the number and timing of trains can be matched to the volume of demand, so that train loadings can be kept high. Also, because such services normally operate over densely loaded routes where the system cost is well covered by the total traffic, there is less reason to run lightly loaded trains which yield very little margin over their own direct costs, since they may displace more profitable traffic.

With a few minor exceptions, fast and semi-fast services are located upon only those routes shown as full lines on the traffic density map (Map No. l), and on those lines, away from the urban areas, they carry a high proportion of the total passenger flow.

To date, receipts from fast and semi-fast inter-city trains have been fairly stable and may be expected to remain so. They have not, however, kept pace with rising costs and the margin of receipts over direct costs does not make the contribution to the system which it should.

Inter-city distances in Britain are such that the squeezing out of rail traffic by the combined assault of air over the longer distances and the private car over the shorter distances is far less serious here than in larger and less densely populated countries such as the United States, where the process is almost complete.

Even though main road congestion is being reduced in many places, urban congestion remains at such a level as to discourage use of private cars for even medium distance journeys between large centres of population on grounds of