A farewell to Clive, and another part of my childhood

The C5 may not have made the impact he hoped, but many people have tried to improve individual transport and failed. Look at the Segway and its many ups and downs, or the current UK battles over when and where you can drive (ride? what is the correct verb for this? I don’t know) an electric scooter. Somehow, somewhere there is an amazing method to economically and efficiently move individuals around in an environmentally friendly way that will catch on and be a success.

…it’s called a train with frequent and reliable service, and we used to have them?

Did we? Did we really? I remember being a wee nipper and seeing the Jimmy Saville “This is the age of the train” adverts, and I’m not sure the UK train network has been that reliable during my lifetime. Certainly, given the continual above-inflation ticket price increases it has become vastly less affordable over time, contributing to the ecological disaster that is people burning jet fuel to get from on side of the UK to the other (say, Newcastle to the southwest of England) because it’s cheaper and quicker than a cross-country train.

No, it was mostly destroyed during the 1960s by a Transport Minister who personally profited from the road-building that followed, using as his patsy a businessman with no experience of railways. Since then there hasn’t been the will or money to rebuild it.