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Terry Casey

In article , lid
says...

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...

I'll assume you mean *don't*.

They must have rail lines and ignored them

Gosh you mean we ship stuff around in containers, even by rail? [1] I
though the luddite unions so beloved of the likes of drivel saw such ideas
off in the 70s.

Most is shipped by rail. More should be. The only Luddites was the
outdated Tory party. Thatcher who for spite outsourced manufacturing to the
Far East decimating UK manufacturing industry.

There wasn't much left by the time Thatcher arrived on the scene!

The Luddites had already exported the London Docks to Rotterdam and our
car manufacturing industry to Europe and the Far East. Ditto ship
building.

In the late 50s I watched as BR built a massive new marshalling yard to
handle the container traffic from Tilbury. Thanks to the dockers'
efforts, the trade didn't materialise and the yard laid idle. In the
meantime, ASLEF made the railways so unreliable that most rail users had
switched to road haulage by the time the container traffic finally
arrived.

At around the same time I recall a couple of extremely lengthy disputes
which brought the shipyards to a standstill. Both were demarcation
disputes.

One was about whose job it was to hold the bucket that caught the hot
rivet, ready for the rivetter to fit. The other was about whose job it
was to twang the string that made the chalk line on the steel plate to
show where it was to be cut.

A couple of years later, as the orders dried up and yards were being
closed, I recall the unions demanding that the government should do
something about it ...

--

Terry