The Anonymous Widower

Are The Railways Of Saxony A Benefit Of Communism?

Saxony is a German State with a lot of railways. This page is a list from Wikipedia.

In the UK, after the Second World War, we needed to modernise our railways and what we did was rather patchy and haphazard.

It finally, led to a lot of costs to no great benefit.

• I can remember taking over five hours on a journey to Liverpool in the 1960s.
• I always in the 1960s and 1970s, used to look at a heavy rail train and say how inferior they were to what the London Underground offered.
• Electrification was very slow to come in. I can remember Trains Illustrated saying Felixstowe will be electrified soon in the 1960s.
• Schemes like the Picc-Vic Tunnel in Manchester never saw the light of day.

Finally, the Beeching Report put a can on it.

But in the former East Germany, there were no such cost pressures in a centralised communist economy, where maintaining employment was a priority.

One thing you notice in the are is lots of signal boxes, often with an associated level crossing. Do they need them?

Whereas we would shut railways enthusiastically to cut costs, the East Germans didn’t, as it was against their politics.

So a lot of railways got preserved, where other countries would have closed them!

Now you can see a lot of railway development, as like the UK, Germany is coming round to the view that railways are what people want and they’re good for the economy.

July 23, 2016 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Germany, Politics, Trains