Reality check: Stopping heritage steam won’t help to save the planet
THE heritage railway sector can hold its head high despite its enforced ‘double shutdown’, in which the traditional post-new year closure period has also seen any semblance of public activity blocked by lockdown during the worst global crisis since the Second World War.
Working within the strict confines of Government Covid-19 restrictions, right across the sector green shoots of a new spring are bursting forth, evident not least of all in the many locomotive and rolling stock restoration projects that are making heady progress in workshops across the country out of the public gaze. February has seen the latest locomotive to steam for the first time in the heritage era, in articulated Beyer Garratt No. 130, for example, and it is set to play its own part in the resurgence of the Welsh tourist economy, whenever that may restart.
Elsewhere, the pioneering spirit of enterprise displayed by the sector over the past 70 years is again shining through the gloom. As mass public vaccination is underway, lines everywhere are adapting to the ‘new normal’ with a renewed determination to survive and succeed.
I applaud the West Somerset Railway for its ‘people first’ policy of offering personal support for staff and volunteers during the crisis; after all, without them, there can be no heritage railway movement.
While the pandemic is far from over, the sector finds itself having to plan for a second crisis of its own that is now looming even closer on the horizon – the threat to supplies of steam coal.
I long for climate change mitigation as much as the most committed of the green campaigners, and fully support every meaningful measure taken to replace fossil fuel burning with renewable energy wherever possible. Yet is forcing industries such as steel and cement manufacture to import essential coal supplies from halfway round the world – from places where it will be exported in a manner which produces far greater CO2 emissions than the transport of minerals from a local source – an effective long-term answer?
We now risk of placing ourselves in a trap of dangerous tokenism.
Heritage railways have a huge public and popular profile in the UK, not least of all because of their immense contribution to the tourist economy, and while steam locomotives remain the predominant image of the sector, they emit around only 0.2% of the country’s total CO2 annual emissions – around half that from garden charcoal barbeques.
If our heritage lines were to cease operating altogether, because of the refusal of local authorities to grant planning permission even for the smallest of mines, their demise might well be rapturously applauded by the activist lobby as evidence of success – but what would the campaigners have really achieved, other than creating a minor public scapegoat for visible coal consumption?
Yes, the loss of our beloved steam trains might convince some members of the public that the powers-that-be now mean business and at last we are on top of the greenhouse warming crisis. Yet the continuing and necessary coal consumption by the other aforementioned industries would mean that the infinitely bigger core problem has in cold reality not even been dented, and the population has been lulled into a false sense of security at our sector’s expense.
Whitehall needs to listen and fast. Perspective is needed here, big time.
“While the pandemic is far from over, the sector finds itself having to plan for a second crisis of its own that is now looming even closer on the horizon – the threat to supplies of steam coal.”