It has been another fraught Easter for King’s Lynn and West Norfolk as holidaymakers poured along our local roads on the way to the Norfolk coast. This has resulted in traffic chaos and hours of almost complete gridlock in King’s Lynn on three separate days, with two serious accidents at the Hardwick roundabout, including at least one very sad fatality.
Surely anybody who still thinks these (now annual) periods of severe road congestion can be solved by more investment in roads and a road-based transport system has taken leave of their senses? We simply must shift to a properly multi-modal transport network. And railways could offer so much! Not only statistically safer, reliable mass transport – but advantages for a low carbon transport network that supported cycling and walking as well. In fact, the very model that many other countries are investing in right now.
At KLHRC we are not big on nostalgia – but we share with you below 15 minutes of a documentary film from 1968 recording the last few weeks of the Dereham to King’s Lynn railway. Like the King’s Lynn to Hunstanton railway, this line was not recommended for closure by Beeching, but was instead run down by British Railways until it was simply unviable. The characters in the film reflect the mood and ideas of the times – that railways were ‘old fashioned’ and unpopular. But were they? It now seems utter madness that more than 100 years of investment in railway infrastructure, not to mention an experienced and diligent workforce, were written off by a couple of decades of one-eyed transport policy making.
How many frustrated car drivers would have preferred a comfortable train ride to the seaside this Easter?