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Non-Royal Mail goods on mail trains


Liam
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On Wednesday I ordered a book from Amazon about the Midland & South Western Junction Railway. Early afternoon yesterday I received a notification on the ‘track your order’ page on the Amazon website saying that my package had been despatched from a distribution centre in Gourock. 
 
The next time the tracker was updated was 03:18 this morning when it arrived at a distribution centre in Milton Keynes. I live in Worcestershire so it seemed an odd detour to take, but then it progressed to another centre in Banbury, which it left mid morning. 
 

The fact that the package went via Milton Keynes made me wonder if it hitched a ride on a mail train going south from Shieldmuir Mail Terminal. I checked Realtime Trains and it could have been put on a train to Warrington but there didn’t seem to be any trains going further south that stopped anywhere before Willesden, so would have gone from Warrington to Milton Keynes by road. 
 

Regardless of the journey my own package made, it got me wondering if parcels from Amazon/DPD etc are ever transported by rail? While the only mail trains that exist today belong to Royal Mail, if there weren’t many non-RM parcels that needed taking south and the train was paved to go that way you could easily send them by rail (albeit for only part of the way), reduce the number of lorries needed and cut carbon emissions. 

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TTBOMK, RM only carry their own traffic on their trains, and as the TOCs no longer accept parcel traffic, your book will have most likely come entirely by road.  The routing may appear illogical, but the distribution networks operate with hubs, so the collection will take the book from it's originating point to a main hub, where it will be sorted and sent to another main hub, then to the local delivery service.  Banbury appears to be your local hub, and is probably closer to MK than the next alternative, or it may be that that particular routing is the fastest at a given time of day, depending on the lorry schedules and the loading/unloading arrangements.  It may be that the trailers are not unloaded but simply attached to different cab units as well.

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I think ROG are working on it. They have bought redundant EMUs, classes 319 and 321 I believe, with a view to convert them into bi/tri mode parcel units. They could become something similar to the class 325 RMU, but with either battery or diesel or in the longer run maybe hydrogen as well as OHLE capability, so could become quite useful....

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1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

TTBOMK, RM only carry their own traffic on their trains, and as the TOCs no longer accept parcel traffic, your book will have most likely come entirely by road.  The routing may appear illogical, but the distribution networks operate with hubs, so the collection will take the book from it's originating point to a main hub, where it will be sorted and sent to another main hub, then to the local delivery service.  Banbury appears to be your local hub, and is probably closer to MK than the next alternative, or it may be that that particular routing is the fastest at a given time of day, depending on the lorry schedules and the loading/unloading arrangements.  It may be that the trailers are not unloaded but simply attached to different cab units as well.


Possibly, although there are no shortage of warehouses and distribution hubs in the Birmingham/Redditch areas, so I would be surprised if Banbury was declared to be my nearest. As you say it was probably down to which lorry was travelling in roughly my direction during the wee hours and which distribution centre it was travelling to. 
 

Here’s the train I thought my book was put on - as there were almost four hours between it leaving Gourock and the train departing Shieldmuir that would have given it time to skirt around Glasgow on the M8 then be processed at the mail depot.
 

https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/train/C06021/2021-03-25/detailed

 

I’ve seen photos of the EMUs which ROG have acquired; let’s hope they bring lots of parcels onto rail traffic and away from roads. 

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1 hour ago, Davexoc said:

I think ROG are working on it. They have bought redundant EMUs, classes 319 and 321 I believe, with a view to convert them into bi/tri mode parcel units. They could become something similar to the class 325 RMU, but with either battery or diesel or in the longer run maybe hydrogen as well as OHLE capability, so could become quite useful....

https://varamis.co.uk

 

 

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One of the problems is most of the new Mail Centres aren't rail connected or even near railways. Warrington definitely isn't. It's all set up for road traffic I'm afraid. 

 

You can't blame them. When I worked for RM it was virtually every night that we were standing there with no mail. Just not reliable enough, especially when people demand that things turn up within a certain time.

 

Next day delivery on your Amazon Prime using trains? Forget it. They'll be paying more out in compensation than they are making.

 

 

Jason

Edited by Steamport Southport
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I don’t think you would manage Amazon next day delivery via rail, but as for myself I haven’t got Amazon Prime and just selected ‘standard delivery’, and it so happened to arrive 48 hours after I had placed the order. 

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The only way you would get Amazon etc parcels on the Wembly - Sheildmuir service is if Amazon have contracted RM to move them. Some of the courier companies use RM for the 'last mile' delivery (Whistl for example) but I don't believe any of them would use RM for trunking, it just doesn't make sense. The bulk flows in lorries are the efficient bit of their operations, the costly bit is the postie / white van man trudging from house to house. 

Edited by Wheatley
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I came across a video on YouTube the other day about Railnet, and how it seemed to be a waste of money. 
 


What caught my attention though is 6 minutes in, when mail workers are shown shifting parcels clearly showing the Amazon label. We won’t know if those particular parcels were put on a train during their shipment, and I now acknowledge that my book wasn’t, but it is still interesting and shows that Amazon parcels, if they’ve been sent by Royal Mail, are likely to go on mail trains. 

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On 26/03/2021 at 16:28, Liam said:

The fact that the package went via Milton Keynes made me wonder if it hitched a ride on a mail train going south from Shieldmuir Mail Terminal.


To the best of my knowledge, no Mail trains call at MK. The Amazon mega-shed is on the other side of the city, very close to the M1, and I think is served entirely by road.

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There was an item in the latest Modern Railways (which I have now lent to someone so I can't check the details) about one of the new "Parcels EMU" companies starting running their trains in revenue service recently.  The picture showed the converted EMUs being hauled by a Class 47 as I think something wasn't quite finished with them.  Pretty sure Shieldmuir GPO Terminal was said to be the originating point, although their customer was not Royal Mail.

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12 hours ago, Liam said:

I came across a video on YouTube the other day about Railnet, and how it seemed to be a waste of money. 
 


What caught my attention though is 6 minutes in, when mail workers are shown shifting parcels clearly showing the Amazon label. We won’t know if those particular parcels were put on a train during their shipment, and I now acknowledge that my book wasn’t, but it is still interesting and shows that Amazon parcels, if they’ve been sent by Royal Mail, are likely to go on mail trains. 

I have seen the YouTube video, I think the footage is fairly old, very late 90’s/early 00’s.  It would make sense as Amazon was fairly new in the UK, 98 if I remember right, selling things like books, music, games etc, so most likely used RM for distribution. 

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On 02/01/2022 at 02:20, Ncarter2 said:

I have seen the YouTube video, I think the footage is fairly old, very late 90’s/early 00’s.  It would make sense as Amazon was fairly new in the UK, 98 if I remember right, selling things like books, music, games etc, so most likely used RM for distribution. 

Working for Royal Mail at the time I remember that there was a steady rise in the number of Amazon packages that were being handled in the the system, mainly books at first. But once Amazon's operations became big enough to justify their own distribution network that business virtually disappeared almost over night.

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