As laid down in its 1958 Memorandum of Association, the Railway Conversion League Ltd (non profit making) exists "to promote recognition of the need to convert railways into roadways" - in other words "to turn the railroads into real roads"

Freeways have far more capacity to carry people that is now being realised. If one lane were reserved for buses, it could carry 50,000 passengers an hour in 1,000 buses, each with 50 passengers, all seated.

Donald A Morin
Chief, Public Transportation Branch,
US Department of Transportation
August 1970

There is no transport corridor in the country where demand would exceed the capacity of a bus lane. A strong argument can be made for converting railway lines into express bus routes . As for branch-line rail services, some of these cost as much as £1,000 (£8, 600 at 2004 prices) a year for each regular passenger, where bus services along the same route would be a fraction of the price.

The Economist 6 May 1972

. this year the railways may lose, on one count, around £270m (£2.3bn at 2004 prices) . This is equal to nearly half their turnover . Railways are an anachronism in a small country in a motorway age . public transport is cheaper by bus, cheaper still if some of the old railway lines were used for special bus tracks.

The Economist 17 June 1972

One thing the railways need is a period of experiment to see if such ideas as turning the track into high speed bus lanes look as good in practice as they appear on paper. The Great Central line into Marylebone would be an ideal stretch on which to try this out.

The Economist 12 August 1972

The US Department of Transportation established in New York in 1970 a 3½ mile contra-flow bus lane (exclusive during the am peak) along Route 1-495 from the New Jersey turnpike through the Lincoln Tunnel. In the am peak it handles ten times the number of people handled by any of the other lanes, and it has reduced the average time of the bus ride by 44 per cent. It has passed 68 buses in five minutes, equivalent to an hourly flow of 817 buses; analytical studies indicate that its capacity is substantially higher than 800 buses an hour.

Report by US Urban Mass Transportation
Administration, in Traffic Engineering & Control
October 1972

. in a country of Britain 's size . a railway is inefficient at almost any size . buses could provide both a cheaper and a better public transport service . the public does not appreciate these arguments . the public grossly over estimates the social and environmental value of railways.

The Economist 14 October 1972

One is not only saying that a rail haul generally has to be 250 miles to be economic, whereas more than 70 per cent of freight movements in this country are no more than 25 miles; one is saying that railways are incapable of offering the kind of freight service society increasingly wants . The car and the lorry have come to the rescue of the city . the way the environmentalists in particular talk about the railways reminds me of the tale about the king's clothes. It is an exercise in mass self-delusion.

Dan Pettit
Chairman, National Freight Corporation,
reported in The Time 17 October 1972

There is a perfectly simple answer to the problem, which could give Britain 's rural areas a more effective public transport system than now . The key lies in the conversion of railways to roads: a process advocated by a body called the Railway Conversion League. In recent years, as the League shows, hundreds of stretches of former rural railway have been incorporated into the road system . The technical problems are not great . a 24 foot single carriageway, well aligned, can provide smooth and fast traffic flows. In countries like Holland, for instance, many motorways are built to this specification . Railway conversion on this model would give hundreds of miles of well aligned rural main roads as an alternative to the present road system . New bus services, replacing the trains, would share the roads with ordinary traffic . The economic benefits from this solution should be self-evident . Of course, because of tired thinking and institutional barriers, it may not happen. But at least . it would be worth a detailed look at the technical and economic implications.

Professor Peter Hall, University of Reading,
in New Society 23 November 1972

But what about the many hundreds of acres of railway land in London , much of which is under-utilised, and none of which carries more traffic than a road system could handle in the same space, at the same speed and at half the cost?

The Economist 9 December 1972

Any serious attempt to apply modern railway techniques in Britain would be "economically and environmentally harmful, and conceptually grotesque", a leading management consultant, formerly with Canadian Pacific claimed last night. "It is Britain 's good fortune that she is the size of a local delivery area and is surrounded by all weather ports", Mr Lionel Albert told the Railway Conversion League in London . "In Britain rail routes should be converted to bus and lorry routes."

Report by Michael Baily in
The Times 13 December 1972

The ghost of George Stephenson still haunts the Ministry for Transport Industries. On Monday the minister, Mr John Peyton, approved a £50m (£430 million at 2004 prices) grant towards the £65m (£560 million at 2004 prices) cost of an ill-conceived and extravagant new 34mile railway from Tyneside. Manchester is proposing a similar system . The Tyne plan uses existing railway line for most of the route. In the study that advocated it, instead of going for conversion of rail into busway, Alan M Voorhees, the American consultants, assumed that the 11ft rail track would have to be converted into a 12ft bus lane, with 3ft verges. But the average British bus runs on 10ft lanes, often less; its fatality rate is slightly less, per passenger mile, than on British Rail . An interested precedent is the 1-495 busway into New York which carried ten times as much traffic as the Tyne system is ever likely to do. This is a lane less than 11ft wide, with no shoulder; it is separated from oncoming traffic only by a few rubber markers . The whole specification examined by Messers Voorhees was on an extravagant scale, which made the busway twice as costly as the rail plan; in Britain railways have been converted into roads for only £50,000 (£0.43 million at 2004 prices) a mile . Contrary to expectations, a bus fleet is much cheaper to run than a train. The subsidies along on many London commuter services exceed the cost of carrying the same passengers by bus. Parliament would do well to reject the bill Tyneside has placed before it.

The Economist 23 December 1972

A single lane of highway used exclusively by buses would provide corridor passenger-carrying capacity in excess of almost any known level of demand.

Report for US Department of Transportation
January 1973

The main blame for the mismanagement of British Rail in its first 20 years must be shared between the British Transport Commission and successive governments, with by far the greater share resting on the former . Possibly they might have been expected to know better. Perhaps some of them did know better, but were prepared, cynically, to accept the rewards of high office in the BTC and the railways in return for the unpalatable task of tricking the government on a mammoth scale. Those men were either fools or knaves .

from "The train that ran away" by Steward Joy
Ian Allan 1973

It will be seen that on new track, for the circumstances considered and ignoring passenger-time cost, the cost of an urban railway is about three to five times that of an express bus service . Compared with an urban railway, an express bus service can utilise costly track much more intensively, employs lightweight inexpensive rollingstock, tends to be less labour-intensive, and by largely eliminating line-haul stops and minimising interchange achieves faster and more convenient service.

"An Economic Comparison of Urban Railways
and Express Bus Services" by Edward Smith,
Journal of Transport Economics and Policy
Vol VII, No 1 January 1973

The turning point in the debate about disused railway lines was a report "Disused railways in the countryside", published by the Countryside Commission in 1970. The report was by Dr J H Appleton, reader in geography, University of Hull . It showed that disused rural railway lines could be put to a wide variety of amenity uses . However, many authorities, to the delight of the Railway Conversion League, are making roads out of disused lines. This is particularly the case in Devon and Somerset . The advantages are obvious. The severance of agricultural land is already long established, BR is the only landowner who has to be dealt with, and the track is just wide enough for a two-lane carriageway. Southport CBC's engineer and surveyor, N E Tovey, is perhaps the pioneer of railways into roads schemes. He constructed 4½ miles of 24ft wide carriageway along the coast at Southport for about £129,200 (£833,000 at 2004 prices) . This works out at around £29,000 (£190,000 at 2004 prices) a mile! [the cost per sq metre at 2004 prices is £16]

Municipal Engineering 2 February 1973

If the entire railway network were converted to roads, and all the existing rail traffic transferred to lorry or bus, less than a tenth of the capacity of the new roads would be utilised. That would leave the other 90 per cent for the transfer of lorries from the existing cramped road network to the converted rail system, with greater environmental advantages than rail can hope to achieve . How much would it cost? From actual examples it would take, at current prices, about £80,000 (£516,000 at 2004 prices) a mile to convert two-track rail into road and, therefore, about £920m (£6bn at 2004 prices) to convert the entire rail system . in addition to saving the £160m £1.25bn at 2004 prices) a year subsidy, there would be perhaps another £300m (£2.4bn at 2004 prices) from road taxes (British Rail pays no fuel duty, licence duty or purchase tax) . The investment could even pay for itself in about two years. Public passenger transport running costs would be almost halved . The Government believes that Britain cannot afford its railways, but cannot afford to give them up. It could be wrong.

The Economist 24 February 1973

The Government has accepted in principle the main recommendation of the Layfield inquiry which examined the Greater London Development Plan: that the inner ring motorway should be built . the public deserved a better analysis of the transport problems that it has been given . The panel seems to have been overwhelmed by the learned evidence it received form either side . It also failed to look at suggestions for cutting the cost by aligning more motorway along underutilised railway lines . no action was taken on the otherwise promising GLC study done in 1969 of an alternative to the motorway box using railway land . the St Pancras line and the North London Railway which, at Hackney Wick, links with the M11 and the east cross route. The Layfield inquiry was told of this land use study but never asked to see it.

The Economist 24 February 1973

As so often, the fashionable ideas - and in particular the belief that rail is obviously better than road for carrying commuter traffic - are simply not borne out by the facts . there is an overwhelming case for a thorough consideration of the conversion to road of parts of the suburban rail system . A single urban motorway track could carry 500 double-decker buses with 60 seats each - that is 30,000 seats an hour . buses can provide a good range of non-stop services, while stopping services can also be provided by using lay-bys to act as bus stations . Insofar as the capacity of the road is not fully needed for buses it can be made available for cars. This solution can give the unfortunate commuter a far better defence against strikes and also against the inevitable steady rise in labour costs.

Professor Alan Day, London School of Economics
in The Observer 18 March 1973

As rail routes the rail network is never likely to be used to more than a fraction of its capacity. But it remains a communications network of incomparable potential if people would only break the habit of regarding it as something on which trains alone may be permitted to run. Were Mr Marsh to be given a free hand to decide on which tracks he wanted to continue to run trains, and on which it would pay him to run buses, or to charge tolls to other vehicle users, the answers that he might come up with could begin to look different and even exciting. They might even show that British Rail again had a future.

The Economist 23 June 1973

All is not lost. A new scheme is being put about for coping with the juggernauts ... It is, quite simply, to concrete over many of London's least efficient railway tracks and run lories - and buses as well - on them instead. The relief to existing lorry-filled London streets would be considerable. And commuters would leap at the chance of a direct high speed bus route to their place of work. Simon Jenkins in

The Evening Standard, London 17 July 1973

The railways are not without their efficiency as killers; a recent Paper has estimated that, per hour spent on them, the railways are twice as dangerous as the roads.

J J Leeming, in the Journal of the Institution of Highway Engineers,
September 1973; the Paper he referred to being
"Comparison of the Safety Records of BR and Highways of Britain "
Accident Analysis and Prevention, Vol 2, No 2, 1970

Total user (time) costs are about equal for rail and bus. However the line haul supplier costs are much greater for rail. As a result total trip costs are approximately twice as great for rail as for bus . Three times as many gallons are used by the bus-wagon/rail combination as by the integrated bus. This ratio applies to both the residential collection and the line-haul/CBD portions of the trip.

Report for the US Department of Transportation
"Evaluation of rail rapid transit and express bus service
in the urban commuter market" October 1973
(The Hayden Boyd Report)

The London rail study group . under the chairmanship of Sir David Barran . could do worse than spend some of its time going through an American report . in which it was calculated that for town commuting buses were faster, and a third cheaper, and used less fuel, and produced less pollution, than any form of train . There is nothing especially new in this conclusion. A study by Meyer, Kain and Wohl showed the same thing in 1965; so did a study by a staff member of the Greater London Council last year.

The Economist, 26 January 1974, referring to the
Hayden-Boyd study (No 22 above) and
Edward Smith's (No 14 above)

Commenting on a British Rail advertisement which claimed that a train conveying 250 passengers from London to Newcastle uses only 400 gallons of fuel: "six of our long-distance coaches will do the same job and uses about £150 gallons."

F A S Wood, Chairman, National Bus Company,
in a letter to The Times 15 April 1974

. when trains are still the theme of nursery rhymes and children's stories, it is small wonder that the railways have a romantic fascination for most adults. Only years of nursery conditioning can explain the calm with which the public has accepted a bill of £3,000 millions (£33bn at 2007 prices) to subsidise British Rail over the last decade .

Why should we go on pouring money into the railways? If British Rail were Concorde or Maplin this endless drain on public funds would be regarded as a national scandal. Think, we would be constantly told, how many schools, hospitals, council houses could be built with all that money . When the railways were built in the nineteenth century they evoked the same squeals of anguish from Wordsworth and other Victorian environmentalists as new road do today.

The people who use BR's passenger services are mainly the better-off. The poor suffer from the diversion of resources out of improving roads and bus services, into keeping up the railways. It is the suburban owner-occupier who supports BR's commuter services. It is the businessman who uses Inter-City: the poor go by car . If the resources had been pumped into bus transport that have been lavished on the railways, we would no doubt now have a flexible system of rural transport based on post-buses, instead of a sporadic system of branch line services. We would no doubt have a fast and comfortable express inter-city bus service, on the lines of Trailways and Greyhound in the United States . We might even have taken note of the series of studies which suggested that for town commuting, buses are faster, cheaper, less polluting and use less fuel than trains.

Frances Cairncross, Economics Correspondent,
The Guardian 29 April 1974
(Now, 2005, the managing editor of the Economist)

In Nottingham, by the year end, feasibility studies will be finished on converting 15 miles of disused railway into a concreted busway . studies by the consultants Freeman Fox have already shown the busway to be cheaper to build, cheaper to run, and able to attract more passengers than either a light railway, which Tyneside chose in preference to a busway, or a futuristic driverless minitram of the type Sheffield is considering.

The Economist 18 May 1974

The taxpayer is going to have to fork out more than £2 billion (£13.5bn at 2004 prices) in the next five years to support British Rail. It . means that nearly half BR's costs will be born by the taxpayer. In return there is little hope of any increase in the railways' contribution to Britain 's transport: 8 per cent of passenger miles and 19 per cent of freight ton miles . Spending on this scale will leave much less money for building roads.

The Economist 15 June 1974

Britain's transport policy is now in very serious trouble, as even those responsible for it ought to admit . The amount of new or improved trunk road to be built by the early 1908's will be cut by over a third. . The cuts are necessary because Mr Mulley is spending his budget on public transport. The £400m (£2,7bn at 2004 prices) a year rail subsidy announced last week is twice the present spending on trunk roads . The only purpose served by fare subsidies is to re-distribute income, and they are a funny way of doing that. It is chiefly the affluent who travel, whether by public or by private transport. They spend more on bus and rail than the poor. In fact, on the latest figures a family with an income of £25-£30 a week spends an average of 61p on public transport but nearly £2.50 on motoring . public transport subsidies are straight subsidies favouring the better off . As for Parliament, it should reject the Government's proposal to let British Rail slip deeper into the red through the new Railways Bill, and not pass any legislation until some more constructive solution has been put forward.

The Economist 22 June 1974

COMMENT That rail subsidies in particular favour the better off is shown by the following figures published in the same number of The Economist (22 June 1974). They amply confirm Frances Cairncross' statement - not quoted in No 25 above - that railways are anti-social. Bus usage is much more evenly spread over the different income groups and car availability remains high at quite low income levels.

But, as some further figures show, railways do not merely subsidise the well off, in the main they subsidise the well off in south-east England .

HOUSEHOLD EXPENDITURE BY REGION 1971/72, PENCE PER WEEK

How much longer will the rest of the country put up with this?

. the motoring and road haulage organisations had a powerful case yesterday when they protested at the latest cuts in road-building, the fourth in 14 month. Despite years of anti-road, pro-rail propaganda, 86 per cent of all goods journeys - and nine out of ten passenger journeys, public and private - are by road. Rail transport can never match the roads in flexibility.

The evidence for this is the persistent decline in rail traffic in the past six years, despite £1,000 million of subsidies.

The Daily Telegraph 30 July 1974

The new Railways Bill will cost every income tax payer £160. And it is just a holding operation. It is time to start planning for the next one . possibly as much as £1 for every time someone gets on a train, and nearly £300,000 for every mile of the railway . All reasonable discussion about the role of the railways has come to a halt.

The Economist 13 July 1974

COMMENT: All reasonable discussion on the role of railways has certainly come to a halt in Parliament. This is because MPs, at any mention of cuts in rail services, are bombarded with letters from an articulate, influential, London-orientated by very small minority who find subsidised railways convenient for their own use. MP's themselves , with free rail travel, form part of this minority. Perhaps the figures above may help to make them realise that there are electoral advantages in supporting roads.

The railways are a bottomless pit into which a large and increasing proportion of the taxpayers money is being drained - to no purpose. Yet railways are NOT EVEN NECESSARY - in our small island they do nothing that cannot be done more cheaply and conveniently by road transport.