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How do we get more freight off the roads and onto the railway?


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I have put this in UK discussions rather than overseas because it involves both.

 

Where I was living in Herefordshire until recently, there would be about 40 lorries a day bringing fruit and veg from Spain down narrow lanes to a local packing plant. Thousands of lorries cross the Channel every day. Where I am living now in France, there are very few freight trains but the nearby motorway is crammed with lorries, including many of the big Spanish hauliers' vehicles.

 

The costs of one of these lorry trips must be enormous: fuel, ferry fare (for UK), driver wages, etc......

 

Now that there is "open access", surely it would be in the interests of these companies to put their trailers (or containers) on their own train. A big investment would be needed to create transhipment points and for suitable wagons but that is surely something that Govts could back with guarantees.

 

Spain, of course, presents a specific technical challenge with track gauge but there are ways round that.

 

Apart from what should be a good financial case, we really need to do this if we are serious about reducing carbon emissions. It takes a lot more energy to move this freight by road than it would by rail.

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It needs a total change of mindset at the DfT.  A decade or so ago when all the talk was of the electric spine and converting Basingstoke to Millbrook to AC, I asked the DfT what the point was unless the Government was going to encourage freight operators to use electric traction.  The response was that rail freight was "nothing to do with us".  That attitude still persists in the DfT.  By contrast the freight companies are now getting more interested in electric haulage than at any time since BR days.

 

There are numerous hypocrisies in the "green revolution" and the absence of a viable long distance non-diesel HGV and the Government's hostility to electrification and modal shift is right up there amongst the biggest.  There's a report somewhere that shows if just 300 route miles were to be electrified then a huge increase in electrically hauled freight would ensue.

 

Unfortunately I think we have to let the DfT find out the hard way that batteries and hydrogen won't shift many wagons from Westbury to Newbury because at the moment they are sitting there with fingers in their ears yelling "la, la, la".  The penny will drop eventually but we are going to have to let them figure it out in their own time.

Edited by DY444
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Unfortunately, standard road trailers, as used in the uk and the rest of Europe, will not fit in the uk loading gauge even on specially designed wagons. This means that investment will already be much larger as trailers must be specifically designed to be lower (therefore carrying less cargo too). 

 

Intermodal containers would be slightly easier to achieve, but you still need suitable wagons (bought or leased), freight operaters on both sides of the channel, paths on the whole route etc. 

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Intermodal seems to offer the most effective option rather than new road trailers / wagons or specially built rail wagons plus the facilities either end.

 

All these flows will be at the whim of where the product has been sourced and who it is going to - i.e. there will be changes over time, perhaps annually.  Having fixed assets only works if there is control over the entrance and exit to the spine that will deliver the product.

 

At least with intermodal you can have refrigerated containers taken from anywhere in Spain brought to the nearest suitable intermodal loading point, the train can move to the UK via France and the Chunnel and to one of the many intermodal centres in the UK.  All that infrastructure already exists, it is perhaps only the cost difference that is the issue and availability of paths.

 

From a Covid perspective having more product imported and exported via intermodal, even if traversing the Channel on a lorry trailer without a driver/cab, has to be more sensible that having lorry drivers going all over Europe with loads and risking transferring infection between countries.

 

Intermodal trains is rather like the shipping we see now, everything in containers because that is how the world operates - specialist vehicles are restricted to goods that cannot travel any other way.

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There are a pair of trains carrying Trailer On Flat-Car (TOFC) traffic/ containers between Calais and Turin and Calais and Spain. Between them, they convey perhaps 100-150 trailers/swap bodies per day; in comparison, the Shuttle was carrying twice that in one hour in one direction prior to the pandemic. 

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Maybe a start would be to impose an HGV ban on Sundays.... And then actually raise the lorry tax regieme to reflect the real ware that they do to the roads, but the knock on effect of that will be that everyone will have to get used to the end of the cheap shopping that we are used to, and actually start paying the real price for things, and that includes the real cost of air travel as well.... 

 

Andy G

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If this is viewed from a political point of view as well as the vested interests point of view if begins to make sense. 
 

Why would any uk gov of any party want to change the status quo?

  • Fuel duty and employment of truck drivers. (put trucks on trains and suddenly down goes fuel tax, road and insurance revenue and up goes unemployment in road haulage
  • Totally bias safety regulations that continue to tolerate professional road freight transport to kill innocent people every year whilst insisting proffesional rail freight cannot.
  • industrial estates planned and built with only road infrastructure 
  • Cost of training and employing rail freight train driver, with all the required safety legislation and continual retraining (rules / routes etc etc) from scratch approx £100k
  • Failure to implement enforcement on total road network weight restrictions meaning local and minor roads subjected to continual damage by unsuitable and unregulated weight 
  • Rail bridge strikes by road haulage and road vehicles continue to be around 2000 per year ....again politically tolerated. (Imagine if there were 2000 road bridges struck by out of gauge rail vehicles per year) the anti rail uk media would shut the railways down.
  • New over road over rail bridges in the UK don’t have to allow for an increased rail loading gauge. New Railway bridges do, they have to allow for the maximum clearance even if there are height restrictions further back down the road.

.....To name but a few but why would anyone in power ever change. Roads don’t have to financially justify their existence. Railways do. Apart from a few very minor examples, we just don’t built railways here. Gov UK are just waiting for electric truck technology to become more efficient and main stream then the railways will have lost their advantage and we won’t have the need for rail freight anymore. Road haulage can continue to use and disproportionately damage the public road network and can continue not to have to pay for the real cost of it. 

Edited by Grizz
Missed out a word
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  • RMweb Gold

Without going political you will never get a major shift to rail under a tory government as a lot of road hauliers are tory supporters 

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Some of the railways have little capacity for extra freight (WCML for instance).

We all know the solution but there are so many people still spreading lies about HS2 just being a vanity project to cut a few minutes off a longer journey that any solution generates a huge amount of opposition.

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24 minutes ago, russ p said:

Without going political you will never get a major shift to rail under a tory government as a lot of road hauliers are tory supporters 

The only party that would be likely to try and get a lot more on to rail would be the Greens. All the others have too many vested interests to seriously forward a major shift to rail. 

 

As to getting lorries off the roads, you would need a massive development in infrastructure, and certainly towards the extremities of the UK there is likely to be little use for these. As an example, one of the major local food suppliers has a site that could easily be connected to the rail network. They send out and receive many lorry loads of veg each day, however many of these are backloads for the supermarkets. These customers are sending their lorries down here on a daily basis to supply the shops. They are not going to want to have to drive their trailer to the railhead, get it on the train, unload it at the other end drive it to shops then drive it to the packing plant, reload it on to the train, unload it at the other end then drive it back to the warehouse. (sorry about the long sentence but it was done to emphasise the challenges). The timings on this would be horrific and the costs likely to be very uneconomical.  

 

The above example is not the biggest challenge however. The biggest challenge is to change the perception that we can have what we want now, or at least in 24hours. This would be a seismic change and not something that I would expect to see, just look at the companies who are now offering groceries to be delivered within 15 minutes of ordering (insane - https://weezy.co.uk ). 

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Most existing main routes are running to capacity - hence HS2. Strategically many of the useful cross-country routes no longer exist, a good example being the old S&DJR route, many romantics are calling out for the re-instatement of the line, but forget it needs the old MR link northwards. As 'LNER4479' sez, the country ain't big enough to make it economically feasible in this day, and age.:sungum:

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59 minutes ago, russ p said:

Without going political you will never get a major shift to rail under a tory government as a lot of road hauliers are tory supporters 

There no need to go 'political', the whole idea is dead in the water which ever way ya look at it, I don't think any politician would think it's worth worrying about, as we've seen with the opposition to HS2 it's a pure vote loser.

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9 hours ago, Tom D said:

If shipping freight by rail was a financially & logistically viable option, this would be a moot discussion.

Indeed, rail can be efficient for moving large quantities of goods between  fixed points at fixed times, but pretty much the entire economy has been moving away from that model for decades, towards 'little and often'

Edited by spamcan61
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1 hour ago, LNER4479 said:

Make the country about three times bigger so that transport of freight by rail gets into the zone of overwhelming economic and point-to-point advantages compared to road.

 

That for me is the essential problem for rail freight in the UK; The traditional rail-suited traffics, ie mainly coal, are or have disappeared, and for other traffics the cost and time required for transhipping, whether a lorry trailer or container, makes rail largely uncompetitive in a small island like ours. 

 

A project regularly promoted by politicians and others is the re-opening (or in reality, rebuilding almost from scratch) the Dumfries/ Stranraer line, to take lorries off the A75. Which might work if all the lorries came from the same place or area, say London, and could be efficiently and economically transported, by rail, straight to Stranraer (or today of course Cairnryan). But if, as I suspect, they come from all over the UK, a rail transit just say from Carlisle to Cairnryan would be hopelessly uneconomic. 

 

 

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  • RMweb Gold

The problem is you won't without a massive change in the public's attitude to price rises. The genii came out of the bottle and will be very difficult to put back, in just the same way that plastic packaging will be very difficult to eradicate whilst we still self serve from the racks in shops. It probably also requires a massive reversal in global trade so long-haul is unnecessary as people buy local stuff. It would not surprise me if there are dedicated trucks taking Cadburys chocolate products from Birmingham up to Yorkshire and bringing back Rowntrees! That last comment is flippant but the fact we don't buy locally made items anymore is also part of the issue. 

 

To get freight off the roads onto rail or canal requires at least two transhipment points over and above the load/unload action at the source and end delivery site, most small multi-modal transhipment points have been closed so they aren't there anyway even if the will to use them by a supplier existed. The transhipment, even with containers, also adds in delays and extra labour costs. Look back at films about railway modernisation and you will see the inherent problems from an efficiency perspective.  Where I live is a quarrying area which exports tonnes of stone weekly off Island by truck, in Christopher Wrenn's day it was short haul horse carts to ships, in the rail era tracks extended right into the quarries and dressing/finishing works - if a supplier today wanted to do rail the nearest rail head is now 6 mies away (currently passenger only) so it goes onto a truck, that truck is far easier to drive straight to the end user. The flows from here are too small to be run as a bespoke bulk train and Speedlink wagon loads have long gone.

 

 

 

Edited by john new
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There must be a general slow shift happening on intermodal - the fact Manchester can support two or three of them, a new one is being developed in Sheffield means the network is expanding, what it needs though is impetus to accelerate it.

 

When I look at video of the WCML between Rugby and Crewe - the number of intermodal trains is staggering - DB, GBRF, Freightliner & DRS all run them and then there are the aggregate, automotive and cement trains.

 

Railfreight has a bright future and it is clearly winning business, the loss of coal was expected and the reduction in those flows looks to have created opportunities for more intermodal which runs a higher speed.

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2 hours ago, russ p said:

Without going political you will never get a major shift to rail under a tory government as a lot of road hauliers are tory supporters 

But it opens up the discussion of a national integrated transport policy.

This was something covered in Yes Minister, series 3 episode 5 "The Bed of Nails". It may be fiction but every argument against such a policy has a certain logic to it.

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With large numbers of EMUs going for scrap many of these could have been converted to freight multiple units. 

These could be used for moving parcels and supermarket deliveries. On my local line there are 10 supermarkets next to the line. Plus a large DHL parcel depot. A lot of the lorries serving these could be replaced by freight multiple units. 

In addition in Greenock there is a large container terminal with large ships coming in every container goes in and out by road. Up until the 1980s there was a railway line going in there the trackbed is still there and has not been built over. Surely reopening the line would be an easy job and remove thousands of lorries from the road.

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2 hours ago, russ p said:

Without going political you will never get a major shift to rail under a tory government as a lot of road hauliers are tory supporters 

and the lorry drivers labour

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Just now, darrel said:

Surely reopening the line would be an easy job and remove thousands of lorries from the road.

No, for reasons already discussed, transhipment costs time and money, and the loads from one container ship might well have literally a thousand different destinations and rail can't deal with that efficiently 

 

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4 hours ago, woodenhead said:

Intermodal seems to offer the most effective option rather than new road trailers / wagons or specially built rail wagons plus the facilities either end.

 

GB RailFreight agrees with you.


 

Quote

 

GB Railfreight officially received the delivery of its first operational Ecofret2® triple-container flat wagon sets from VTG Rail, which will be used to support GBRf’s growing demand for intermodal services.

The wagons arrived at GBRf’s new headquarters in Peterborough following successful prototype testing and approvals. The Ecofret2® is the latest innovation in maritime container transport and a revolutionary addition to VTG Rail’s fleet. These state-of-the-art wagons remove empty spaces that are often present in other wagons, but which are inefficient and cause turbulence during the journey, thus reducing fleet efficiency.

 

 

https://www.gbrailfreight.com/gb-railfreight-receives-new-wagons-from-vtg-as-it-looks-to-expand-its-intermodal-business/

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3 minutes ago, darrel said:

With large numbers of EMUs going for scrap many of these could have been converted to freight multiple units. 

These could be used for moving parcels and supermarket deliveries. On my local line there are 10 supermarkets next to the line. Plus a large DHL parcel depot. A lot of the lorries serving these could be replaced by freight multiple units. 

In addition in Greenock there is a large container terminal with large ships coming in every container goes in and out by road. Up until the 1980s there was a railway line going in there the trackbed is still there and has not been built over. Surely reopening the line would be an easy job and remove thousands of lorries from the road.

That's one way of putting up prices, porters at every station unloading, transferring from railway to lorry or railway wagon to wagon . Plenty of scope for delays/ confusion and theft..

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1 minute ago, TheQ said:

That's one way of putting up prices, porters at every station unloading, transferring from railway to lorry or railway wagon to wagon . Plenty of scope for delays/ confusion and theft..

 

The return of RedStar Parcels?

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