ABSTRACT
This chapter explores just one of the many regulatory decisions affecting the railways in the period 1918 to 1923. The failure to properly consider the impact of road haulage on the dominant existing rail technology reflects badly on the administrative process. However, much more research remains to be done in this area. In establishing a post-1918 settlement that neglected road haulage, government failed to address the changing technology of the internal combustion engine running not on rails but the road. This failure to recognise that the internal combustion engine would change the market for freight transport and distribution led to many of the difficulties faced by railway companies in the interwar period, a fact recognised by the appointment of a Royal Commission on Transport only eight years after the passing of the Act, and the eventual granting of rail-hauled road powers in 1928.
