Gareth Dennis has written a splendid book on why railways are the best and necessary way forward for a sustainable and socially just transport system, finds Kevin Crane

At the start of summer, I thought Andy Beckett’s book about the Bennite and Corbynite movements, The Searchers, had dropped with somewhat edgy timing when a snap election had just been called. This author has just done a ‘hold my beer’ with this one, releasing a book about the railways just as he himself has become a major story in the rail sector. Some of you are probably familiar with outspoken engineer Gareth Dennis’ spectacularly unjust sacking from his employment at the rail-sector consultancy SYSTRA, as a result of his drawing the ire of Network Rail’s national chair – and recently ennobled Labour minister of state for rail – Peter Hendy.

Dennis gave quotes on overcrowding and safety concerns about Euston station to the Independent. The content of what he said was evidenced and already in the public domain, but Hendy was determined to punish him for his temerity. He had no legal means to discipline Dennis – who, as mentioned, was employed by a private-sector company – so instead he used the sheer economic power of Network Rail (it is a practical monopsony, or sole market customer, for almost all railway infrastructure) to order the boss of SYSTRA to sack him or the company would be put out of business. It’s a gross abuse of power by a corporate tyrant whom Keir Starmer has promoted, and it has rightly caused consternation throughout the industry.

While Gareth Dennis would not have planned for this, it does give him some time to promote this book. And well he should, because the book is excellent. It’s also timely for reasons that have nothing to do with his personal case, because although it is absolutely about the railways, it is also a profoundly useful intervention into raging debates about technology, development and climate change. In my opinion, Dennis’ stances are ones that the left should be widely adopting, not just because they are good transport policy, but because they amount to a strongly argued economic case that avoids the various different pseudo-radicalisms and thinly veiled reactionary arguments that come from other sources.

Making sense of the nuts and bolts

Dennis lays out his core argument right at the start. He says that there are two clear physical reasons why trains are the most sustainable form of mechanised transport: the first is the exceptionally efficient and durable carrying capacity of steel wheels on steel rails, the second is that they can be powered electrically by wires.

The wheel/rail interface requires a little discussion of solids mechanics: essentially rolling wheels over roads consumes a quantity of energy that depends on the materials of both, and it also imposes wear on both. The key point here is that the only real alternative to trains – rubber-tired vehicles on tar-Macadamised roads – are far worse on both counts. The energy needed, and therefore fuel consumed, by road vehicles to traverse roads per the weight of the passengers or freight (and both are vital) is much greater, meaning that the road vehicles are worse economically and ecologically. This much should be obvious, really, even to people who didn’t necessarily understand it in those precise terms.

Road wear might be the more surprising advantage of trains. We’ve all become familiar, to the point of boredom, with people whinging about potholes in the street. Debates about this tend to over-focus on potholes as a municipal-funding issue, as if their prevalence is purely down to austerity. This underestimates how much roads are, in fact, at a practical limit of how useful they are as a technology. There are simply too many vehicles on the roads, weighing too much, and the inevitable outcome of this strain that an excess of heavily laden tires on tarmac is that it erodes away. Not only does tarmac take more damage proportionate to usage than the railway. it is also relatively more expensive to maintain, so again, it’s an economic hit.

Lithium: I killed the environment, I’m not gonna cry

Moving on, the point about electrification is just as significant economically, and perhaps even more so ecologically. We’ve had about a decade, at this point, of excitement about electric vehicles as the technological breakthrough that will save us from climate change. The problem with all this chatter is that it treats electric vehicles as a novelty because what they mean is specifically lithium-ion battery power electric vehicles … and the ecological case for these is simply not what the public have been led to believe it is. Lithium-ion batteries are heavy – heavier proportionately than internal combustion engines – and unlike a tank of petrol, get no lighter the more energy is consumed. The practicalities of just swapping petrol and diesel engines in vehicles have been proving to be serious design challenges, but that’s only the start of the problems.

Replacing every current internal-combustion engine car with an electric vehicle is a something that our society has been aspiring to do for years now, despite the fact that you don’t have to dig very deep to realise that it can’t happen. No, not at all: it is not possible, and we have simply been pretending otherwise. Electric cars have worked OK for a minority of ‘early adopters’, but these are largely relatively affluent people with things like a driveway where they can reasonably recharge the battery in their own time, and who don’t need to worry too much about the almost total crash in value the vehicle undergoes once the battery is nearing end-of-life (a mere decade, tops). This is simply not an option for lower-wealth people in high-density urban areas (where the heavier cars are making even more potholes, by the way). But it gets even worse if you take a step back from that.

Lithium is a ‘miracle’ substance for solving the ecological crisis that is, itself, a growing environmental menace. Readers of this website who’ve been following reports from Serbia will know that the German car companies are currently manipulating that country’s government into allowing a polluting and deeply unpopular lithium works to be built. In 2019, the US automotive industry also clashed with popular will in Bolivia over lithium extraction – and spectacularly lost – when they sponsored a coup that was defeated by working-class resistance. Where lithium extraction is most prolific, it has yet to be demonstrated that the processing is socially just or sustainable. So even if we must have some lithium, then it is clear that its use should be moderated, particularly since questions hang over how much of the substance can be feasibly acquired across the whole of the world.

And do you know one really easy way you can electrify transport without needing a milligram of lithium? If your guess was ‘put overhead electrical lines on the railways and just run electric trains directly off the grid’, then you have more common sense than the entire current generation of tech entrepreneurs and elite policy wonks.

History to inform the future

Along with a solid technical justification, Dennis weaves a really warmly (though not sentimentally) reproduced history of the railways through his arguments to provide clear evidence for them. This includes some things you may know, such as how government intervention after a horrific train collision in Northern Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century forced reluctant private train companies to implement the signalling systems that we now take for granted. Some are definitely more obscure, such as how the present-day successfulness of railways in various countries is heavily influenced by historical rail policies of those territories. You are likely to be surprised as to which country he thinks, on the basis of performance data, has the most successful railway. I’m not going to spoil that detail, but I will say that he is able to use these different world rankings to disprove a lot of what neoliberal-minded economists claim about railways.

Speaking of neoliberalism, it really has done so much to degrade and drive away crucial rail-sector infrastructure. I still feel a bit sad when he refers to facilities that were sold-off and broken up in the early twenty-first century. I actually had the mixed blessing of being one of the last generation of train rolling-stock engineers to ever do a student placement at Horbury Junction Railworks before that got shuttered up, and I also briefly experienced the failed experiment of ‘pop-up’ rail manufacturing, of which the author is also critical.

I agree with him, though, that the built infrastructure of the railways is secondary to its human infrastructure: a force of skilled and experienced people that can make the trains do what they need to do. Currently, policies for both recruitment and retention of good people are, as he demonstrates, absolutely disastrous. On the one hand, there has been the terrible scourge of outsourcing, which means that entry-level jobs on the rail are often entry to nowhere. I remember the late, and much missed, RMT union leader Bob Crow saying that his own career, before becoming a full-time official, was progressing into engineering on London Underground from having started as a sixteen-year-old train and station cleaner. This is a trajectory of progression firmly killed off by ensuring that cleaners be a disposable sub-caste of the workforce.

On the other hand, there is the never-ending series of disappointments that are ‘science, technology, engineering and manufacturing’ (STEM) initiatives, which aim and absolutely never succeed at getting more and increasingly diverse young people into sectors that include rail. Dennis writes that the whole thing has been structured around a neoliberal commodification of education that cannot deliver for structural reasons:

‘The reality is STEM initiatives result in doors into engineering being closed, not opened. The idea that you need to have completed a STEM degree to be a capable or competent engineering practitioner is patently false. Indeed, the sector needs more people with a more diverse range of interests and capabilities, not least in language, graphic design and social sciences’ (p.166).

A politics of true public transport

Talking about technical issues in a political way has been taboo for a long time, and this is in no small part because capitalist interests at the top of institutions have their own political views and don’t like them being challenged (Hendy – ahem!), which makes it all the more refreshing when you get a book like this that is informed both by specialist knowledge and good politics. I haven’t gone into some of the other interesting areas that the book tackles – like funding models, station design or system automation – because I really want to stress the political side of the content.

Sides in discussions about the economy and climate change typically split into three camps. The first camp is denialism. This has a hard variant, typified by figures like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, and essentially argues that we just pretend that the climate is not changing and oppose decarbonisation on the grounds that fossil fuels are prosperity. There’s also a soft variant expressed by Keir Starmer and the state establishment, that verbally acknowledges the crisis’ existence but says that dealing with it is a luxury that no one could possibly afford (until perhaps some future time, when the bankers allow it). The practical differences between these variants are limited; they are both essentially invitations for catastrophe to simply happen and hope that one has, personally, amassed enough wealth to survive. The left does, mostly and rightly, reject and oppose this disgusting rubbish.

The other camps are what is often called ‘degrowth’ and what Dennis here calls ‘technologism’. Degrowth is pretty much what it says on the tin: roll-back capitalism’s damage to the Earth by rolling back its works, reducing energy consumption, using less infrastructure and allowing much of it to decay, and most definitely travelling less. Technologism is the hard opposite, in which you use more and more advanced technologies to increase efficiencies, replace previously constructed systems and resist climate chaos. There are plenty of people on the left who advocate both these approaches, but this book argues for neither of them. And it rejects them both on left and materialist grounds.

Concretely, both degrowth and technologism could only be delivered in a class society as major acts of injustice. Degrowing the economy under capitalism (arguably the actual policy of Rachel Reeves, at least in part) means that only the already wealthy will be able to benefit from the declining pool of produced goods and services. In transport terms, this simply means that when the petrol-car economy ends (officially 2050, but I reckon it’ll happen way sooner), most ordinary people just won’t have access to transport. This is obviously not a workable settlement. In a funny way, the wing of the radical right that carry out insane demonstrations against ‘fifteen-minute cities’ and other such nonsense, have partially realised that this might be the case. So, even though these idiots’ proposed solution is denialism, they are arguably more aware of this danger than many on the left.

Meanwhile, technologism under capitalism, which is more widely applied in reality already, also exacerbates existing inequalities. We’ve already discussed how there are winners and losers in terms of the emerging lithium economy, but Dennis writes in the book that this is also true in even more brutal ways regarding minerals we don’t talk about as much, like cobalt. Cobalt enters our economy through, bluntly, slave labour. And he points out that this is not an anomaly; relying on more and more exotic technologies will demand more and more exotic resources, often extracted through inhumane and ecologically damaging means. All too often, this is to deliver final products that are not practically superior to much simpler solutions.

The author’s proposal is to look to practical solutions, to build an infrastructure that will enable us to adapt our society – including, not excluding, everybody in that society – to the needs of the changing world that is coming. This means organising an adaptationist camp to respond to climate change, challenging the capitalists that variously prioritise their minority interest in pursuing other ways forward. Regarding organisation, Dennis doesn’t shy away from praising the RMT, of which he is a member, in his afterword, as one good example. This takes courage when the establishment in the railways is usually very hostile to openly pro-union commentary. I’m sure RMT was backing him in his dispute, and yet another good reason for you to buy a copy of this book is that that would be an easy way for you to support him too.