Chris Harvie: The new railway children

WITH oil price rises running against the car, it’s time Scotland unlocked its potential to help establish a fresh balance of power that draws on our long history with rail, argues Chris Harvie

“The railway is here and it’s going to change everything.” The first editor of The Scotsman, Charles MacLaren, in 1825, recognising the social gunpowder of the steam train. Then Northumbrian colliery engines clanked along at 3-4mph, but he consulted his Encyclopaedia Britannica friend Robert Stevenson – grandfather of RLS – who reckoned on at least 20mph, with better boilers and iron track: revolutionising not just economics but international relations, rushing armies to frontiers, wrecking the balance of power.

Stephenson’s 30mph Rocket (1830) made Friedrich List in 1841 and Major von Moltke in 1843 begin to make this German policy. By 1860 even the arch-liberal John Stuart Mill averred that states either directed rail transport or died. Neo-liberal Austria privatised its brilliant Vienna-Trieste line (its freight engines invented by the Scot John Haswell) to the French… who in 1859 evicted them from North Italy. Observed by MacLaren’s European correspondent Theodor Fontane: later to record the rise of Europe’s new rail-based metropole, imperial Berlin.

II Geopolitics and Transport

The present Scotsman can get a bead on the inevitability – indeed imminence – of a second, far larger-scale, railway revolution. Scotland can take a lead in it, replacing petro-capitalism with an order pivoted on electric land transport and a post-hydrocarbon economy.

The Financial Times’ Markets section forecasts maximum oil price instability from now on: maybe a see-saw, more likely a “superspike”. As ever, City dealers will behave badly, so expect prices maybe hitting levels like $250 a barrel, once forecast for about 2030 at the earliest. Throw in Iranian and Russian political crises? Any advance on total chaos?

Yet, read the railway technical press on the Mediterranean-to-Gulf region with most of the world’s easily recoverable oil, and inbuilt international tension. In 2000 this was the big car economy. No longer.

In the 1900s this had been the Heartland of the Eurasian “world island” on which the founder of geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder scoped the UK-versus-Russia “great game’. Forget the American Admiral Mahan and the mastery of the seas. Watch the young Scots-Indian administrator John Gordon Lorimer, whose “stupendous” 5,000-page Gazetteer documented the Gulf region in 1902-8.

Since the oil price-escalation of the 1970s, and the destabilisation of Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Lebanon, the Gulf has undergone mass-urbanisation. Its land transport developments are now moving with almost lightning rapidity and the sums are trillion-dollar: rapid-transit/high speed rail projects under way via the Gulf Co-operation Council, from battered Iraq via Kuwait and Dubai to Oman and Yemen. A huge Saudi rail net, already half complete, and an Emirates Union railway to avoid Iranian pressure on Hormuz: a rush of modernisation started, irony of ironies, by the Israelis when they upgraded their old colonial system after 1996.

From the Gulf look east and west. European rail joined up last year, via Iran, with the huge Indian network. Under Afghan chaos a national rail system is under way. Next door China has a rail boom that dwarfs 19th-century America, and in Africa its concessions, from Ethiopia through Sudan to Chad and Niger, promise an east-west artery across the continent to Dakar: only 1,800 miles from Brazil, three days by freighter.

The BRICs are changing from acronym to economic unit. After the shambolic car-and-lorry story of the Trans-African Highway from the south to Kenya, whose bars and brothels turned Aids into a scourge, Africa is sorting itself out and growing at 6 per cent. European eco-technology has been cloned with the Confucian rationality which piloted the Celestial Empire for two millennia, to which Mao’s cultural revolution was simply a blip.

III Transport without Oil

Why rail? Not super-ships or planes? Oil again. Essential in the air or at sea, but an electric rival to the petrol engine remains as remote as in Henry Ford’s day: as Erikka Askeland showed in a recent Scotsman piece. Megatrains already underlie the China boom: oil scarcity threatens containerships which are worth more as scrap than when working, discharge tons of CO2, and are vulnerable to pirates, disastrous inundations, huge insurance premiums. Alternative? The rail “landbridge” connecting with marine shuttles, Djbouti-Dakar running on clean photo-voltaic electricity: needing a fifth of road’s landtake.

Further, accessible solar power – the “coal equivalent” of the equatorial belt – can help prevent catastrophe. The Brazilian rainforest is ceasing to be a sink for excess CO2 but a generator of the poison. Reversing desertification by projects such as Desertec is only possible with low-carbon infrastructure.

The BRICs have so far done cheap manufacture. Now their industry must adjust to sophisticated capital-goods production, because of the collapse of the hydrocarbon-junkie West’s buying power, flagged up by finance catastrophe after 2008. A Colorado-California rail trip showed that airport-and-motorway, air-conditioned, super-sprawl – Denver-Phoenix, or simply “Springfield”? – will fall off the $250-a-barrel cliff: finis for the Age of Ford.

Rail is back as a regional carrier, not just getting Chinese stuff to the ’burbs on three-decker, mile-long freights. A new partnership can stuff software and alert adaptation into BRIC-produced shells of locomotives, trucks, rails. Computers and geographical-social info are a version of Moltke’s General Staff, directing adaptation via our “library” of detailed geography/logistic knowledge – like young Lorimer in the 1900s’ Gulf . Fuse our learning to developing littoral prototype-development sites such as Hunterston and Rosyth, and we’ll get somewhere.

IV Scottish Lessons

A rain-lashed run to London in 1977 showed how stressful and dangerous cars were. I kicked a non-habit, had German and Holyrood careers, got about the globe, organised seminars, 14 books so far, with Geotechnics (Argyll) to come; about 40 per cent of the work done on planes, boats, even on buses to Melrose, but mostly by train.

Our Borders line (MacLaren’s friend Stevenson surveyed an 1814 scheme) could be better-planned, dispensing with long, expensive stretches of double-track for the short signalled loops that work fine on German regional lines. It ought to extend to Carlisle to schlepp-in continental-loading-gauge trucks with equipment for our North Sea renewables.

A new Forth road crossing, in time of Peak Oil? MacLaren would have slung the cash at a Scottish high-speed net… and making cruise ships, regional and highland lines into an all-weather tourism network. In Switzerland the Rhaetian Railway was in the early 1980s an ailing branch-line; now there’s a 12-car Glacier Express every hour.

Prof Peter Woodward of Napier argues high-speed lines need new types of rail foundation. Might the Third Bridge be saved by inserting Woodward-type high-speed tracks, as on the “cable-stayed” bridge between Copenhagen and Malmo. Can we get Scottish High Speed cheaply by adapting motorways as cars price themselves out?

Britain called the wrong shots. In the 1970s we backed Concorde; at least Giscard d’Estaing hedged bets with the Train à Grand Vitesse. Those of us “playing trains” on Welsh narrow-gauge lines were sharper than the atomcrats of Wylfa and Trawsfynnyd, now closed but still toxic. But the men who spread such lines world-wide, like Robert Fairlie, pioneer of articulated engines, could as trainees get about Scotland by rail as, unlike in England, all Scots trains carried third-class. In many of them Anthony Trollope of the GPO regarded his compartment “as a mobile office” long before netbooks and wifi made it more efficient than a static one.

Fourteen per cent of the world’s people have cars, a stalled proportion thanks to population growth, but already pumping 23 per cent of CO2. The open road is closing. MacLaren got it right. The railway isn’t just eco-friendly, carbon-poor. It has the convenience, the character, the culture to undermine any come-hither that cars can exert. Don’t just think Nigel Gresley or Patrick Geddes, but Graham Greene or Alfred Hitchcock. Compare with Jeremy Clarkson. No contest, really…

• Professor Chris Harvie is a former SNP MSP and historian.