More engineering courses would be needed to keep sector alive

REGARDING David Holt's star letter in Plaform issue 278, ‘Will steam preservation also move into the past?' I concur with many of the sentiments, not least the age profile of many of the activists in the preservation movement – namely those of us who cut our teeth as locospotters (to give us the more correct nomenclature), in the 1950s.

Inevitably we will dwindle as we gradually go to the giant MPD in the sky, but perpetuating the skills is vital. This can be encouraged if education can be persuaded to be both flexible in timetabling, and adventurous in awarding qualifications. The early teens are not too early for this to start, so that by age 16 a GCSE or its equivalent can be obtained in subjects like heritage mechanical and civil engineering, run by the many preservation societies, long advocated by this writer, but ignored.

There was also a bit of sci-fi futurology that is harder to anticipate, like 500mph Maglev trains. For decades, the conventional wisdom was natural earth movements made it difficult to maintain the fine gap between the train and the formation. Whether this has been solved in existing Maglevs remains to be seen.

These will be extremely energy consumptive, like all high-speed travel, and the ‘ton', (100mph) needs to be seen as the only sensible speed as the only way to reduce C02, and be compatible with sustainability. So slow down all HS2 trains, halving the speed reduces energy and CO2 by 75%.

Beeching closures got a mention. Despite them, the deficit had risen to about £1 billion in 1993, compared with the approximate £100 million in 196263, the last year before the report. This 10-fold rise just about kept place with three decades of inflation, so the benefit of the closures, and the ‘modernisation to reduce costs' is not clear to see.

The £300 million price tag on the rebuilt Borders Railway invites comparison with the cost of keeping the ‘unprofitable' entire line open. One figure seen by this writer at the time of closure gave the deficit for the entire line as £250,000. A guestimate of the accumulated losses, projecting this figure at approximately the varying rate of inflation from closure to re-build, reaches a very round figure of only £100 million. So would keeping the entire line open have cost less than closure, and rebuilding only a bit of it?

Coal availability , and threatened bans on its use is yet another situation for the future, potentially solvable by our own ‘dash for gas'. Methane, CH4, is the simplest hydro-carbon and creates the least CO2, and no ‘clag', as depicted on page 52 of that issue, where Erlestoke Manor is emitting Vesuvian quantities, and putting ‘real' carbon (soot) into the atmosphere, not just CO2. Why clag is deemed attractive by photographers is not clear, especially when it gives such excellent ammunition to those wanting to restrict or ban steam. We could also go ‘forward to the past' and burn wood, which we now call biomass, and accept much lower performance, assuming a firebox full of biomass has less calorific value than the same firebox full of coal.

The Benguela Railway in Angola was long out of action due to civil war. The Chinese are reported to have rebuilt it, and a Rovos Rail charter train recently spent 15 days doing probably the first trans-continental journey from Dar es Salaam to Lobito Bay, but no mention was made of any steam power.

One thing that even a decades-long civil war could not prevent is tree growth. This is sustainability for the future. Any chance the new-build P2 will use biomass from day one?

Wesley Paxton, email