There’s been a suggestion to re-open Franklin Road at Peisley Street to ease congestion there but there’s other closures that would help things if they were re-opened.

Margaret Street railway crossing was closed years ago because of a tragic accident with a train hitting a car and the railways didn’t want to fork out the money to install lights.

Locking the gates was the easiest and cheapest option but huge development since in the north, which includes Charles Sturt University, has snowballed and re-opening the crossing would save motorists lots of time, travel and frustration.

The council at one stage even offered to build a subway under the line at March Street to give better access but the Railways again put the kybosh on things and said it would only agree if the Byng Street crossing was closed.

Imagine the chaos that would have caused. Coming from the north in Peisley Street it’s an extra 600 metres from Margaret Street to Dalton Street to get across the line if you’re going out to, say, the university, and it’s 1.3 kilometres back to the crossing on the Leeds Parade side.

There’s mainly only the XPT running to Dubbo and back each day with a few goods trains now and then, unlike what it was years ago before the government put an axe into country railways.

So it’s an obvious option available to sort out some of our traffic problems if reopening Margaret Street was revisited.

A BITTER war was fought back in the 1980s between landholders and supporters of a proposed Army training school north of Orange that would have generated millions of dollars into our economy.

The school would have had a staff of 2000 officers, instructors and civilians and more than 800 trainees who would have lived in Orange or Bathurst.

The then Defence Minister Kim Beasley, said the site had the best prospects of catering for the Army’s needs well into the next century.

But members of so-called No Base groups used the metropolitan media to issue threats of violence, claimed blood would be shed and warned they would “fight to the death …”

There were newspaper photos of some of them standing at their front gates with rifles, something the then mayor Tim Sullivan said was sensationalism going too far.

The proposed base was later canned but let’s hope a new bid by the council for Defence involvement here gets a fair hearing.

WHAT’S this ban by the supermarkets on so-called ‘single-use’ plastic bags?

They’ve certainly got more than one use.

They’re good bin liners, useful for fruit and vegetable peelings, bagging scraps and following Fido on a walk.

The ban is expected to cut the number of bags we use by about 7 billion annually but they’ll be replaced by, no doubt, 7 billion degradable bags that will cost you 15 cents each.

These bags apparently are more harmful than those they’ll replace, leaving behind tiny plastic particles that could harm birds, insects and mammals when dumped.

Out of the frying pan into the fire?