FOR 170 years our post has been distributed by rail. There is something essentially romantic about a hand-written letter rattling its way across country in a train, evoked beautifully by York poet WH Auden's Night Mail. At the National Railway Museum, children love to play postie on a machine which replicates the night mail experience.

But there is no room for romance in modern business. Royal Mail bosses today announced that the long association between mail and rail has reached the end of the line.

They must be persuaded otherwise.

Britain's roads are already at crisis point. Only today, an environmental group argued that road building plans would turn South-East England into "the Los Angeles of Europe".

Royal Mail insists that it could absorb the 14 per cent of mail transported by train on the roads without extra journeys. This is palpable nonsense. Others estimate it would mean another 160,000 lorry journeys.

The move would be a hammer blow to the Government's objective of increasing the amount of freight on Britain's railways by 80 per cent over ten years. Selby's award-winning Potter Group won royal approval when Princess Anne visited its rail freight distribution centre last week; today its commendably green attitude to transport appears more isolated than ever.

Royal Mail bosses say rail is unreliable. That is rich from a company which delivers one million first class letters a day late. Rail freight carrier EWS has a 93 per cent punctuality level: with jams and roadworks, the motorways would struggle to match that.

Sources say that the Royal Mail has torn up the contract, ignoring EWS's attempts to negotiate on price. That is sadly typical of the Royal Mail's recent record of mismanagement.

However, this is about more than the bottom line. It is about how we shift goods around our crowded island. The Government must step in and persuade the company to keep "the Night Mail crossing the Border, bringing the cheque and the postal order".

Updated: 12:07 Friday, June 06, 2003