Communication Chaos

Northern Advocate, 7 March 1947, Page 5

Communication Chaos

Ice forming with the night’s frost increased the chaos in the weatherbound belt across Britain. More than 300 roads are impassable; railway services are completely disorganised and some road vehicles and railway rolling stock have been lost without trace under drifts. London railway stations today were giving possible arrival times for trains which had left the North of England yesterday. The Automobile Association appealed to motorists not to use cars unless absolutely essential —to leave the way clear for desperate attempts all services are making to maintain a flow of essential supplies. The weather has already affected food distribution. Two rail milk tankers have been missing since the night of March 4 somewhere in Wales.

Five road vehicles, which set out to collect milk from farms serving a Shropshire creamery, have disappeared into the featureless waste land which snow has made of the English countryside. Railway passenger services between the major cities have been seriously interrupted. London is virtually cut off from Oxford. Birmingham sent out only one train for London today. Trains were arriving In London up to 17 hours late after fighting through deep drifts in cuttings and battling against iced rails. Railwaymen cut across country to rescue passengers who had been stranded in a Newport train near Torpentau since Tuesday. A Royal Air Force Lancaster parachuted penicillin and blood plasma urgently needed for a sick man at Cottesmore airfield, which otherwise was isolated. London’s local transport services gradually returned to near normal. Workmen continued attempts to clear the main traffic ways and in Oxford Street used pickaxes to break the ice before shovelling it into trucks. Factories which hoped, with the resumption of electricity supply on Monday, to get back into production, are meeting fresh difficulties because the weather has interrupted coal supplies. 1 The Ministry of Fuel and Power stated that the continued severe cold and extensive snow blocks had caused serious interference with coal production and the movement of coal. Conditions on a number of coalfields and on the railways serving them appeared as difficult as at any time during the winter. The staffs of many collieries have been unable to reach the pits. The “snowed up” belt stretches from North Devon to London and covers the country north of these points to York and North Wales, including South Wales and tv Midlands. Fourteen pits in the Midlands are not working, while the only two working in Leicestershire are operating at under 50 per cent capacity.