RAIL TRAVEL FOR ALL
By John Parry

Up to £2,000 in lifestyle enhancement for commuters and other regular travellers who are able to join the ‘fortunate few’ with access to rail links

‘MOBILE PHONE USERS WELCOME’ would be an unlikely notice to find on the window of a train. But scarcely odd, since people are perfectly willing to tolerate chat between fellow passengers they can see and, after a moment’s reflection, most would agree that phoning from a train is from all points of view much to be preferred to phoning from the car. Indeed, the ability to read the paper, use your laptop and phone friends and colleagues – things that would otherwise have to be done in office or home time – is one of the chief advantages of travel by train and a feature you would expect the train companies to draw more attention to. Train travel makes quality time available which is lost in most other modes of transport, especially the private car.

As traffic congestion grows, so is the amount of time which could be used more productively as a passenger rather than a driver. ‘Time is the new money’ is a remark quoted from one of the union leaders in the recent BA ‘swipe-card’ dispute. If 10 hours commuting by rail each week were regarded as time made available rather than time lost, what is the value to the person concerned? Probably in excess of £2,000 a year!

This is not therefore the moment to be considering cutting back rail based public transport but instead for finding ways of making it more generally available. But this will not be possible if use of the mode is ring-fenced by people saying ‘It must be done our way (expensively!)’.

The chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority, under dire financial constraint from the investment arrears of Network Rail and its predecessors, has recently proposed a lower standard of maintenance for routes off the main line. Despite cries of ‘Heresy!’ from old time religion, the idea should be welcomed at least for the recognition that branch lines, with their lower speeds, lighter rolling stock and simplified methods of operation, do not need the same elaborate safety equipment and track maintenance as the mainline express. An affordable regime for branch lines (with appropriate rolling stock, of course) will not only save money but has the potential vastly to expand the rail market and bring all kinds of social benefits.

The use of rails to aid movement remains a fascinating and wide ranging subject. Applications vary from rails supporting complete bookshelves in reference libraries which can be moved along in order to save aisle space, to carrying huge overhead cranes in steelworks, to ‘white knuckle rides’ at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. In the 1950s when Dr Beeching was planning to cut down the railway network neither he nor his colleagues gave sufficient thought to the possibility of a secondary level of railway operation borrowing ideas from the rapidly disappearing tram systems.

From trunk lines to branches to twigs and twiglets. Trams are a form of railway and should be seen as capillaries to the overall system and no less essential to it than the capillaries of our bloodstream. Trams have an appropriate standards regime which makes them highly accessible, allows pedestrians to cross the track, does not require signals or stations etc. New thinking will allow some branch lines to be reclassified as tramways and take on new life in consequence. And the reverse could happen as the market develops.

For sure, the big system is unlikely to prosper without its capillaries. Mainline station parking lots will grow to the size of cricket fields and weary passengers parked in the outfield will be losing the ‘new money’ they gained by choosing rail.

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PARRY TECHNOLOGY TO BOOST TAMIL AREA RECONSTRUCTION

Parry building materials technology has been specified as the tool to employ in a post disaster recovery situation in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka. During a long and sometimes brutal civil war between predominantly ethnic groups much of the urban infrastructure of Jaffna and Batticaloa has been destroyed. TRO, an organisation committed to rehabilitation of Tamil areas of the country, has decided to equip four construction centres with Parry machines and moulds to produce roofing semi sheets, blocks and floor tiles. The order for the equipment was placed in mid July.

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LOCALLY-MADE ROOFING TILES ENTER THIRD DECADE OF USE IN MALAWI

In the early 1980’s the Malawi Rural Housing programme was assisted by the British Council to assign a group of technicians to come over to Britain for familiarisation with the new form of lightweight roofing tiles recently developed at JPM Parry workshops in Cradley Heath. Co-incidentally a young overseas development worker, Chris Stephens who was attending a course at Selly Oak College, was also visiting JPA’s Cradley Heath base, at about the same time.

The Government Rural Housing Programme then went on to implement projects in many parts of Malawi, first using the 1m long corrugated roof sheets ( the form in which the technology first appeared) and then the small ‘pantile’ a traditional profile. ‘Parry Tile’ is now the generic description of a product which can be seen in many parts of Malawi. The industry is now graduating to the larger and more efficient semi-sheet, a quarter square metre, large format tile. Chris Stephens now lives in Malawi and runs a successful pottery company with operations in Dedza and Nkota-Kota. Because of an inclination to be seen as self sufficient as possible and create the maximum number of livelihoods in Malawi, he has organised the construction of all his own buildings and wherever possible produced the elements with which they were constructed.

In 2003, DFID, the UK government’s overseas development arm, set up a course attended by existing and aspiring tile makers from Mzuzu, Lilongwe, Blantyre and Nkota-Kota. In the following weeks two trainers went onto assist the commissioning of new production plants supplied through various agencies. It now seems probable that a proportion of the output will be used to roof new schools and education offices, which will be constructed in the next few years.

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NEW 1000 HOUSE KENYA PROJECT Urban poor contribute savings for financing of construction using Parry materials

In the late 1980’s Parry Roofing technology achieved a major advance following the decision by the architects and developers of the major housing development at Koma Rock to the East of Nairobi to specify Parry Pantiles for the roofs. Over a million tiles were produced using Parry Multivibe vibrating tables and moulds.

Much of the production of roof tiles for the 3,000 houses now at Koma Rock was performed by the Humama Women’s Group who were brought together by the Director of the African Housing Fund, Mrs Ingrid Munro who saw the opportunity for creating livelihoods for some of the people from Mathari Valley, the notorious shanty town on the edge of Nairobi city. The initiative was a great success creating up to 60 work places and many spin off little businesses adjacent to the production site. Although the new housing programme is complete, the workshop remains functioning providing tiles for additions and alterations.

As reported in issue No 35 of Parry News, Ingrid has now formed the Jamii Bora Trust (‘Better Families‘) which is not only producing building materials but also organising a mortgage scheme to enable people from a similar poor background construct and purchase their own houses on a new site to the west of the city. The target is to construct an estate of 1,000 affordable houses.

The photographs above were taken by John Parry during a visit to the site in May 2003.

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The ease with which overseas aid and development personnel and small entrepreneurs can travel between Britain and the tropics directly affects the conversion of interest into orders and contracts for Parry equipment and services. During the Iraq wars and the ‘SARS’ scare, business slowed to a near standstill. Fortunately during July 2003 the ‘drought’ began to break.

The new order to help the work of reconstruction in northern Sri Lanka is being confirmed with a deposit of funds covering half the amount needed. The organisation is now busy trying to raise the balance of about £10,000. Other new orders advised include various blockmaking equipment for Sierra Leone, 2 roof tile plants for Zambia, a semi-sheet plant for Malawi, roofing and brickmaking equipment for Mozambique and tile moulds for Thailand.

The value of the orders advised will be in the bracket of £40- 45,000 depending on final specification. JPA’s workshops are also assembling two existing roof tile orders for Ghana awaiting completion of payment totalling £11,000. Anxieties over company liquidity remain, although eased slightly by receipts of some useful prepayments and deposits.

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A short cut to high quality construction where livelihoods are needed but skills are in short supply

Parry Associates have taken a fresh look at frame construction to eliminate all of the failings of earlier systems while retaining the essential attributes of speed and simplicity. Everyone aspires to a better life and an important step along the way is a block built house with a tiled roof. Many previous attempts at speeding up the construction process followed an approach of simulating the desired effect, owing more to the art of “Kiddology” than genuine rationalisation. Metal sheets coloured and ribbed to look like tiling and precast panels with brickwork texture are revealed after a few years as a tatty substitute for the real thing. Under the Parry approach blocks are blocks and tiles are tiles – the difference from traditional construction comes from: i) The modular design of the elements ii) Interlocking vertical joints to assist the block-laying task and iii) Use of the steel frame system as an accurate template which guides the masonry and roofing, reducing the need for scarce tradesmen skills.

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During June 2003 two of JPA’s African associates, Abou Manneh and James Peters, spent a few days in the UK after concluding work assignments in Malawi and Afghanistan respectively. This timing made it possible for them to take a hand in the successful trial of the steel frame construction system described on page 6. Abou is now back in The Gambia in his normal role at the Safari Gardens Hotel (JPA’s base in that country). James is from Liberia and has gone back in a one man humanitarian effort to locate and help members of his family who are caught up in the civil war in that country. James had to cut short his visit to Afghanistan providing training and technical support to semi sheet production facilities in Herat and Kabul. Understandably he saw his responsibilities should be to help his family out in a situation of great danger. We wish him well.

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To put together two bad things and come away with one good thing must be one of technology’s better moves. There are mountains of plastic waste in the world arising from packing materials, fast food containers, scrap car interiors, manufacturers’ waste and broken toys. Offer this to the plastics manufacturer and he will turn up his nose unless he can be sure of the origin of the component materials and that the spec suits his product. Meanwhile while this plastic scrap needs to be disposed of, the cost of extracting natural aggregate such as fine gravel continues to rise because of the restrictions on quarrying.

Parry Associates, encouraged by contracts with plastics specialists from Warwick University, have begun a programme of experimental work to determine to what extent scarce gravel can be substituted by shredded and graded plastic waste. The first results have been promising and have attracted the interest of overseas visitors from Barbados and elsewhere. Plastic waste is not just a problem for the UK and to have a means of converting it into a concrete aggregate could be a winning proposition for many countries. UK local authorities are being advised about these developments as potentially helpful to their current plastic waste disposal problems.

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