ABSTRACT
By the turn of the century, the road transport industry was already beginning to display symptoms of overcapacity. In London, with which Pickfords had now become closely identified and where the train of events can be most easily observed, keen price competition, reduced profit margins and long hours of work for the men were the background to the first stirrings of a movement towards larger-scale organisation on both the goods and passenger sides of the industry. The rise of motor transport, which together with the progressive intrusion of the state into the formulation of transport policy has been the dominant feature of the transport industry in the twentieth century, added a greater sense of urgency and a new dimension as its immense productivity began to bite deeply into the hitherto impregnable territory of the railways. New capital threatened old and insistent demands were raised that the national interest required a compromise between the two. 'Road versus Rail' was to be resolved, not in the classic nineteenth-century manner, in which rail simply eliminated its rivals, but in a new, collectivist way in which each transport mode would be allocated its appropriate share of the market. The state was to be the means by which this objective was to be achieved, regrouping the railways in 1921 and setting up the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, eventually, in the belief that such conflicting interests could not be reconciled unless all lay under one authority, to assume ownership and control of the entire industry. Several White Papers and Transport Acts later, the nirvana of inland transport, a fully rational, co-ordinated transport system, has yet to arrive.
