by Metatone
Tue Dec 30th, 2008 at 05:06:14 AM EST
We've discussed the Welsh railway network and possible North-South plans on ET before. Monbiot comes up with an interesting historical point about infrastructure as the sign of an extractive economy and highlights a new proposal. Had any of our Welsh types heard of it?
George Monbiot: Dr Beeching turned the country I have come to love into an outpost of empire | Comment is free | The Guardian
n this spirit I have to record that something is missing. Its absence offends my newfound national pride. It mocks our attempt to become a coherent country. It means that the Gogs (of north Wales) and the Hwntws (of south Wales) will for ever be at each other's throats. It means that the greenest nation in the UK is locked into unsustainability. It is also bleeding ridiculous. As far as I can discover, this is the only country in Europe that you cannot traverse by train without spending most of the journey passing through another. The only rail link that allows you to travel from north to south crosses the border near Llangollen and doesn't re-enter Wales until it approaches Abergavenny, 100 miles away.
The railway map of Wales is a classic indicator of an extractive economy. The lines extend either towards London or towards the ports. As Eduardo Galeano established in The Open Veins of Latin America, the infrastructure of a country is a guide to the purpose of its development. If the main roads and railways form a network, linking the regions and the settlements within the regions, they are likely to have been developed to enhance internal commerce and mobility. If they resemble a series of drainage basins, flowing towards the ports and borders, they are likely to have been built to empty the nation of its wealth for the benefit of another. Like Latin America, Wales is poor because it was so rich. Its abundant natural resources gave rise to an extractive system, designed to leave as little wealth behind as possible.
George Monbiot: Dr Beeching turned the country I have come to love into an outpost of empire | Comment is free | The Guardian
There are plenty of lobbyists calling for new roads, but Deiniol's plan is likely to be cheaper and more sustainable. His survey of the disused railway lines of Wales shows that there is one route - from Rhyl through Denbigh, Rhuthun, Corwen, Newtown, Llanidloes, Rhaeadr and Builth Road to Dowlais - that would require only two miles of new formation to link Holyhead to Cardiff. The rest of the way makes use of current and former railways. He proposes that short feeder lines also be built, connecting this trunk route to Mold, Llangollen, Oswestry, Bala, Hay-on-Wye and Brecon.
The One-Wales Line could not only offer a much faster journey than the current long detour through England, but it would also knit the other railways of Wales into a coherent network, as it crosses the north coast railway, the Cambrian line and the Shrewsbury-to-Swansea line. It would help to regenerate a desperately poor region in the south called the Heads of the Valleys. The project would look rather like the Western Railway Corridor in Ireland, which is reopening 184km of disused lines between Limerick and Sligo.
The least the Welsh assembly government should do is to commission a feasibility study and cost-benefit analysis of Deiniol's plan. His railway would help Wales looks like a country again, rather than a depot for someone else's empire.
