Letter: Swap road surface dressing for an efficient service on railways

Throughout Shropshire many tons of this detritus is being plastered over the roads. In some cases they close the road while they are doing it and you have to find an alternative route. Other times they manage to do half the road at a time.

They recognise one of the dangers themselves and put up signs declaring "skid risk". Try riding a motorcycle through it and the grave risk will be obvious.

The loose shingle is also a very effective chipping agent to your paintwork and your windscreen for weeks after the application. They clean up some of it but the rest remains until it is dispersed by the traffic.

The lumps and bumps of the road are not repaired. Every imperfection is faithfully reproduced a little higher up. The road is noisier to drive on afterwards. The friction and tyre wear is greater.

So why do we do it? Two thousand years ago the Romans came here and sorted the roads out for us. They made them straight and good. After they left we converted them back to crooked tracks and the Highways Agency and the councils have specialists to ensure that visibility is poor and that hold ups are common.

While they were ruining the roads, some bright people invented the railways and they networked the country with a set of nice straight routes. The Government decided that the best thing to do was rip that system up so they tasked a chap with the job in 1965. The result was that many communities were no longer served by the rail network.

Since then the population has dramatically risen and cars on the roads have quadrupled. The result is that journeys often take longer than when you dad took you in the sidecar of his BSA.

What is the answer? HS2? Sadly some people think so, especially those who stand to gain from it. The obvious thing is to reinstate the national rail network and make it reliable. Also get someone intelligent to produce the timetables so that the services link up properly at useful times. Then continue making the roads worse so that people will go by train.

Peter Keen, Oswestry

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