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The end of EU cabbages?

Among the endless debates on the size of cabbages – so far generating a report of some 65,000 words, compared with 300 for the entire American Constitution – and debates on whether Caribbean banana growers are wilfully growing curved fruit, the European Parliament may occasionally be given credit for some original thinking.

For example, during a recent debate on CO2 emissions, a suggestion was made that freight could be diverted from road to rail, as a means of ‘reducing environmental impact’.

All we would need to achieve this laudable solution are some railway lines. Maybe we could create a network of lines that criss-cross the country, serving thousands of towns and villages, with goods yards attached to every station from which small vans could make local deliveries.

I should like to go one stage further, and suggest that these trains (for want of a better word) of goods wagons be hauled by revolutionary ‘locomotives’ from which the only emission would be vaporised water, which I would call ‘steam’. I am sure some bright spark could invent such a thing.

Thus you would have a widespread network of local distribution centres, served daily by ‘trains’ of inert wagons, hauled by ‘steam locomotives’. You could even go one stage further, and attach to these trains what I call ‘carriages’, which could be equipped with seats to carry self-loading cargo, or what might be termed ‘passengers’.

With so many ‘passengers’ travelling on ‘trains’, many roads would become redundant and could perhaps be turned into inland waterways, for pleasure and recreation. Indeed, some far-sighted entrepreneur might even see an advantage in using these inland waterways to transport goods, on vessels hauled by horses, whose emissions might generate sufficient fertiliser for farmers to start growing crops again, instead of having to rely on cream teas and paint-balling to scrape a living.

And such a scheme would also enable us to determine our own size of cabbages. In fact, it is such a good idea that I don’t know why it hasn’t been thought of before.