Snowmaggedon (Four Inches Of Snow)

Britain's public transport system is something of a pathetic disgrace.

Scenic Snow Cover In Britain Hides Traffic Chaos

That's all we can conclude after just one or two days of snow brings utter chaos to airports, rail, roads and buses .... again. Its the same every year.

Now ignoring Scotland, which after all has its own government and really shouldn't be surprised by snow each winter .... England can claim that heavy snow is something of a rarity but hardly unusual. The uplands of Dartmoor, Exmoor, Cumbria and the Pennines for example usually get blizzards and up to 20 inches of snow ... but because relatively few people live in these areas, our planners ignore these annual events.

But what we do class as heavy snowfalls in the more populous areas are often pathetically small. For instance in this latest transport crisis, most of the country has barely had a few centimetres of the white stuff, and the worst affected urban areas have probably actually had less than four inches of snowfall.

However despite receiving what most northern countries would class as a snow shower, the impact on our travel infrastructure is disproportionally extreme. Flights cancelled and runways closed so that even short haul flights to Holland were impossible .... reason 4 inches of snow.

Motorway Madness .... 4 Inches Of Snow.

Motorways closed on the Eastern side of the country ....... reason 4 inches of snow.

Trains cancelled in anticipation of Snowmageddon, then when the raging blizzards don't happen, Scotland becomes a no-go zone, and trains heading up north stop at Lancaster in England. The day after, trains are cancelled or run reduced carriage formations, because "track at the sidings is frozen" or "the couplings are frozen and we can't link carriages up" .... reason 4 inches of snow.

Apparently our rail workers don't carry hot steam torches to unfreeze frozen metal like they do elsewhere - probably because the health and safety squads have deemed them too dangerous for workers to use. Where trains no longer operate, i.e. cancelled, because of rail works, the buses don't turn up .... reason 4 inches of snow.

We are in fact a northern hemisphere country, which but for a fluke of sea currents would be frozen for 6 months of the year. But yet every year our planners act like chicken lickin, and run about screaming that "the sky's falling down", whenever white stuff appears in sky. We invented nearly all modern transport system i.e. Tarmac roads and Steam railways. But we apparently can't manage them.

I don't care if we call it 'Beast From The East' or 'Storm Emma', we should be able to cope. I write this post on a commuter/airport train, on which only half the normal carriages have been set up. This after the earlier train was cancelled .... reason 4 inches of snow. Result chaos ...

Just Four Inches Of Snow.

Snow should be fun, not a miserable experience for commuters ....

Fun Skiing In Edinburgh ...

It's hard to know what global warming will bring, but you can be sure of one thing about the future ...... Britain's public transport will singularly fail to cope.