Along with most other inhabitants of this area, I am an occasional user of the A1079 to travel to Hull and York.


It is obvious that this road, which was designed and built when the fastest form of land transport was a horse and cart, is increasingly failing to cope with modern high-speed transport requirements.


I have read propaganda from the pro-railway lobby, but had never had the opportunity to question its proponents. Since there is already a regular bus service between Hull, Beverley and York town centres, I assumed that the motive of the railway lobby was the relief of the A1079.

My question to the speaker was simply to ask what his response would be were the Government to agree to sponsor his preferred route between Beverley and York, but were to insist that instead of a railway line it should consist of a motorway.

I was not shouted down and the speaker was listened to with patience by the audience as he expressed his passionate opposition to such a suggestion and threatened to repatriate himself should such an event take place.

The Member of Parliament for York explained to the meeting that, in view of the cost of such a project, a railway between Beverley and York would not take enough traffic off the A1079 to make it a viable proposition and that Network Rail had no plans to build such a line.

The impression gained from the meeting was that the campaign for a railway between Beverley and York was based partly on an unreasoned hatred of road transport and partly on a backward-looking sentimentality which refuses to recognise that short, rural lines have been made obsolete by road vehicles with motorised wheels.

A suggested preliminary reading for anyone interested in the problems of transport can be found in a lecture called Transport: Then, Now And Tomorrow delivered at the Royal Society of Arts, London, on 25 November 1998 by Ralph Harrington, a member of the Institute of Railway Studies.

I believe this can still be found, reproduced in full, on the internet.

Allan Melling
Market Weighton