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

[jonny777]

We used to have the makings of a decent rail freight business. It was called Speedlink, and many companies received grants to connect/upgrade their company sites to the network. Rail services ran at regular intervals, and picked up/dropped off wagons on the way

 

But, Speedlink was killed off, and that was the end of that. 

 

Twenty-odd years ago I watched (while commuting) as Wilkinsons built a massive distribution centre within a few metres of the existing railway tracks just east of what remained of the Llanwern steelworks site, but with no rail connection at all. 

 

I'm afraid that with planning decisions such as that, GB and increasing freight flows on the railways are an oxymoron. 

[woodenhead]

Speedlink died because containers did the same job but without the need to load the packages or pallets into a van.

 

You load the container at the factory/warehouse, transport it to the intermodal terminal, load it to the train and away it goes.

 

The real losers with Speedlink going were the chemical companies with odd wagon loads but even here the development of container sized tanks had overcome that issue too.

[Grizz]

17 minutes 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 uk rail network is a third of the size that it was in the 1950s/1960s, and was built on the whole to serve Victorian centres of population and industry. Since then industry builds next to the road network because politically Planning allows this. There has to be a singular Political will to change the status quo otherwise they will continue to make money out of doing it they way they are doing it now. Roads, which are more flexible but are allowed to function with privileges not afforded to the railways. Lightly regulated and virtually self governing, with little if any real time penalties. 
 

The road network maintainer isn’t charged £36,000 (Some London area charges) per minute if it overruns on maintenance work. It doesn’t charge road haulage for the true costs of maintaining the roads because there is no effective enforcement of weight restrictions. My half ton car doesn’t destroy our local country lanes, 44 ton trucks taking short cuts do. 
 

As I said earlier. The UK gov isn’t planning any major new comprehensive method of this shift from Road to Rail because it is hard. They are letting the market dictate and for the reasons I set out before, if you have transport modes that can’t effectively compete against each other fairly, because safety regulations allow one to operate vastly cheaper than the other...then guess which one is going to dominate. 
 

If rail freight were allowed to operate the way road haulage operates with regard to overall safety, ‘accidents and resultant deaths, no regular and ongoing retraining and specific route training, properly informed control of working hours and most importantly all the supporting enforce resources to ensure that they always comply the the stringent safety regulations and enforced weight on infrastructure...then you might begin to shift the balance. 
 

Generally UK planning laws still seem to positively promote all but the most heavy industry from developing next to the road network and away from the railways. 
 

Even when the financial grants of the post privatised era arrived, companies adjacent to the railways could apply for grants to get existing warehouses or new warehouses connected to the rail network. Quite a number did. So tax payers money paid for the link and associated upgrades to warehouses etc .....but there was no requirement for the companies to ever use the rail links. So they got their businesses boosted at tax payers expense. 
 

Look at the Royal Mail rail hubs, all that money spent, all those facilities built and overnight....Ah we are transferring all to the roads, because anyone can drive a truck. Perfect for privatisation, no specialist rail knowledge required just road haulage. How much more attractive was that.

[37114]

There are many very good points made in this thread, just to put some further builds on this (I should say I have worked in logistics all my life and have promoted the use of rail in all of the businesses I have worked in):

 

 

- Rail is best suited for Port to Distribution Centre (DC) movements where containers can be loaded on to shared user or block trains. Many companies use more rail than you think and indeed the company I work for Rails 80% of the suitable inbound traffic. The challenge is to maximise the amount of trunk movements by rail where rail is more cost effective than you would think, by creating more capacity and faster port to Midlands/scotland freight routes. I know of one large DC that was granted planning permission with the condition of a railfreight terminal being installed but the customer of the site only had sufficient volume for half a train per day and the typical small 2 siding terminal needs 2-3 to break even so sometimes the presence of the terminal is not enough to facilitate the switch 

 

- When you dispatch from a DC the challenge is you are sending for example 2 or 3 lorries per week to a store, at peak sometimes 5 to 7 which just isn't feasible for rail and would require a seismic shift in the legislation and cost base to tip these sorts of flow in favour of rail. 

 

- Consumer habits have a part to play. As consumers we are shopping online even more which means more often than not we have the ability to order something at 20:00 tonight to be at our house for 08:00 tomorrow morning. The only way this works is if the lorry leaves the DC at 22:00 to drive straight to a central hub (usually M5 Jct2 or M6 jct2 dependant on your carrier) where it is sorted by an automated sorter and trunked to the delivery depot 2 - 3 hours later. This type of speed is not possible with rail and to be fair neither is the multiple separate transport legs. One option is to look at slower eco routes which may suit rail but again it requires political, legislative will to make it happen.

 

If you want a model of how rail can be used more, then Switzerland have shifted both the economic and legislative model to suit rail. I went to a stationery distribution warehouse near Geneva which had it's own siding for c 5 wagons. The site manager said basically rail was the only way they could despatch stock overnight and the economic restrictions in place suited rail over road.

 

2 hours ago, Grizz said:

 

, no regular and ongoing retraining and specific route training, properly informed control of working hours and most importantly all the supporting enforce resources to ensure that they always comply the the stringent safety regulations and enforced weight on infrastructure...then you might begin to shift the balance. 

 

because anyone can drive a truck. Perfect for privatisation, no specialist rail knowledge required just road haulage. How much more attractive was that.

While I can resonate with much of your post to comment on a couple of your points; the Road Haulage industry is not as unregulated as your post makes out. There is legislation in place to control drivers hours and it is policed by VOSA/DVLA with strict fines/loss of operators licence for non compliance. Managers in Road haulage have to have a certificate of professional competence gained through sitting a comprehensive exam. Contrary to your post not anyone can drive a truck, you need an HGV Licence and also need to undertake a minimum of 35 hours retraining every year. I don't doubt the rail industry is more restricted/regulated but the balance is not as one sided as your post could be perceived.

Edited May 7, 2021 by 37114
typo

[Clearwater]

I agree with many of the points made above about the reasons why transferring cargo from road to rail is a challenge.  Rail only really works for containers if you're going more than 100+miles and you have sufficient volumes to justify the point to point service.  You need to think how many trains per day can you run to get the amortised cost per box below what a road journey costs.  Rail has the strategic disadvantage of requiring at least one, and usually two, extra sets of handling.  If it costs £30/box lift, then that's a lot of money to recover through a lower unit cost of travel.

 

I've always found the below data (AHDB) interesting.  If you look at the 2014 figures, it appears to be a roughly straight line graph with an increase of 70p per extra 10 miles.  ie going 10 miles costs £0.43/mile bit 20 miles £0.25/mile.  If you've got that fixed cost to go the last mile, then if it's not much more than 100miles from the point of import, you're always going to use road.

 

If you want to change this, you'll need to look at how road use is taxed or rail subsidised.  EIther by fuel tax or by road usage.  (I think its a fair to point to say that marginal road use is not priced as transparently as rail use).  Disadvantage of fuel tax is that it could be lost if lorries decarbonise.  In that scenario, you're back to considering the costs of the extra handling that you can't get away from with rail.

[Grizz]

37116 totally accept your points, I could have also worded and defined my post better, apologies for that. 
 

As I have no knowledge of how this works, how would VOSA/DVLA know if drivers were using suitable routes? Over the years I have watched any number of local farms using hauliers with the maximum sized vehicles possible, because obviously for the farmers it keeps costs down. Yet several local roads have bridges with weight restrictions of 20T maximum, which are clearly being ignored. Or is this down to local Police to check, because iif that is the case then it will never ever happen. 

 

 

[caradoc]

2 hours ago, Grizz said:

Look at the Royal Mail rail hubs, all that money spent, all those facilities built and overnight....Ah we are transferring all to the roads, because anyone can drive a truck. Perfect for privatisation, no specialist rail knowledge required just road haulage. How much more attractive was that.

 

In response to a previous post regarding a political party with no interest in promoting rail freight, let's not forget which Government was in power when Royal Mail practically abandoned rail, and did absolutely nothing about it.......

 

[Grizz]

6 minutes ago, Clearwater said:

 Disadvantage of fuel tax is that it could be lost if lorries decarbonise.  In that scenario, you're back to considering the costs of the extra handling that you can't get away from with rail.

 

This is why I believe that the UK Gov / DfT will chunter on making all the right noises about freight off the roads but will ultimately do little or nothing to really address the issues. I truly believe it’s a case of sit back, do nothing and wait until battery and electric truck technology advances and becomes available, then we won’t need railways anymore. If you then ‘pontoon’ electric trucks you get road trains. 25 years ago people would have laughed at the idea of electric cars that plug in, back then the petrol heads ruled the world. 

 

 As I said earlier, we don’t build railways in the UK because they always have to have a financial business case, roads just don’t have that crippling disadvantage, they are just built. 
 

Strange that up until 4 or 5 years ago East Sussex only had one regular freight train. West Sussex had a few but East Sussex only had one to Mountfield. Yet Brighton & Hove area has a population of approximately 1/3 of a million but no freight.

Fortunately now a new sea dredged aggregate terminal has open up at Newhaven and there are usually a couple of trains a day. 

[Clearwater]

1 minute ago, Grizz said:

This is why I believe that the UK Gov / DfT will chunter on making all the right noises about freight off the roads but will ultimately do little or nothing to really address the issues. I truly believe it’s a case of sit back, do nothing and wait until battery and electric truck technology advances and becomes available, then we won’t need railways anymore. If you then ‘pontoon’ electric trucks you get road trains. 25 years ago people would have laughed at the idea of electric cars that plug in, back then the petrol heads ruled the world. 

 

 As I said earlier, we don’t build railways in the UK because they always have to have a financial business case, roads just don’t have that crippling disadvantage, they are just built. 
 

Strange that up until 4 or 5 years ago East Sussex only had one regular freight train. West Sussex had a few but East Sussex only had one to Mountfield. Yet Brighton & Hove area has a population of approximately 1/3 of a million but no freight.

Fortunately now a new sea dredged aggregate terminal has open up at Newhaven and there are usually a couple of trains a day. 

 

I think two issues get conflated in this debate: pollution and congestion.  Rail can address both but pollution can be addressed by decarbonisation of fuel. There are other methods than rail that could address congestion (albeit the rail network has its own congestion issues to manage).  

 

I don't think your second paragraph is correct and that DfT would strongly dispute it!  Road building is subject to the same business case appraisal process as rail.  However, road cases achieve higher benefit to cost ratios than rail given rail building is more expensive.

 

Dry bulk transit is generally more efficient per rail - the quantum of product moved is usually greater and its usually on a more point to point basis.  I think the majority of biomass, iron ore/coking coal/ power station coal etc moves by rail not road for example.

 

 

[Grizz]

In addition freight is always seen as heavy weight items or bulk. What about city centre to city centre parcels. We once had a fairly good parcels service, even using the lockable guards brakes to convey them. This all went years ago and now city centres are clogged with traffic. Great to see that some second gen units look to be being converted to parcels units but this isn’t a national scheme it is small and generally isolated examples. 
Again Gov/DfT making all the right noises but again doing little to really promote it nationally. Just waiting for the battery / electric trucks to save the day.

[caradoc]

6 minutes ago, Grizz said:

 As I said earlier, we don’t build railways in the UK because they always have to have a financial business case, roads just don’t have that crippling disadvantage, they are just built. 

 

I don't think it is quite as clear cut as that; Here in Scotland in recent years we have rebuilt the Larkhall branch, Airdrie/Bathgate and the Borders Railway, and we will have, eventually, Crossrail and HS2. However, although HS2 will certainly benefit rail freight, the other four are all passenger-only railways, and the three in Scotland at least cannot survive without subsidy. Whereas a road once built serves all possible need, long distance and local, passenger, freight, mail, etc. 

 

[Grizz]

2 minutes ago, Clearwater said:

I don't think your second paragraph is correct and that DfT would strongly dispute it!  Road building is subject to the same business case appraisal process as rail.  However, road cases achieve higher benefit to cost ratios than rail given rail building is more expensive.

 

 

 

 

Rail building projects are always more expensive. But why? It is civil engineering after all, so not so specialist. Levelling and embankment for a motorway is the same as for a railway. But it is seen as specialist because that’s they way to make more money from building it for the few companies that do it. 

[Grizz]

1 minute ago, caradoc said:

 

I don't think it is quite as clear cut as that; Here in Scotland in recent years we have rebuilt the Larkhall branch, Airdrie/Bathgate and the Borders Railway, and we will have, eventually, Crossrail and HS2. However, although HS2 will certainly benefit rail freight, the other four are all passenger-only railways, and the three in Scotland at least cannot survive without subsidy. Whereas a road once built serves all possible need, long distance and local, passenger, freight, mail, etc. 

 

Ah Scotland, you’ve definitely done really well and I have worked on the network up there. It is great. but what about the most densely populated area of the country, the Southeast of England. Other than HS 1 etc, next to sweet FA down here and there never will be. Prior to covid the response to over crowding on passenger trains on well over capacity routes was to let the TOCs add 20 minutes or more on to ever journey time because it would improve reliability. Not reopen some previously close rail routes or god forbid build any new routes. All safe seats down here, anti rail and pro road local authorities but making all the right noises.

[37114]

44 minutes ago, Grizz said:

37116 totally accept your points, I could have also worded and defined my post better, apologies for that. 
 

As I have no knowledge of how this works, how would VOSA/DVLA know if drivers were using suitable routes? Over the years I have watched any number of local farms using hauliers with the maximum sized vehicles possible, because obviously for the farmers it keeps costs down. Yet several local roads have bridges with weight restrictions of 20T maximum, which are clearly being ignored. Or is this down to local Police to check, because iif that is the case then it will never ever happen. 

 

 

Trucks are fitted with tachographs which record driver hours and breaks, they are digital these days so easily downloaded to check on hours etc.

 

In terms of misuse of unsuitable routes, most weight restrictions signs have the get out of jail free card "except for access" underneath the weight. If it is the only way to access the farm then the driver is doing nothing wrong. If that part of the sign is not present then you can be prosecuted. 

 

You can report vehicles seen abusing weight limits and they do get prosecuted:

https://www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/news/19075317.three-firms-fined-bradford-avon-town-bridge-weight-limit-breach/

[Joseph_Pestell]

8 hours ago, uax6 said:

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

 

Various sources tell me that shipping costs have doubled in recent months.

[37114]

1 minute ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

Various sources tell me that shipping costs have doubled in recent months.

Correct,  if not more although that relates more to the Far East to UK costs. 

[Joseph_Pestell]

5 hours ago, caradoc said:

 

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. 

 

 

 

But I am not talking about purely UK traffic. I am talking about all the stuff coming from the south of Spain. It may well be that due to loading gauge constraint in Britain it would only get as far as Calais or Ashford. But that would already be a huge gain from a European perspective.

[Tankerman]

I have two comments this subject, both in a sense political.

 

The motorway building program really got into gear shortly after the 1955 ASLEF strike brought about the declaration of a state of emergency on May 31st. I believe that the two were interconnected in that the government realised just how easily they, or any government, could be held to ransom by a comparatively small section of the workforce.

 

Richard Beeching is now widely reviled for closing down approximately 4,000 miles of branch and secondary lines, which were not profitable, and never would be. After his departure the Labour government closed a further 2,000 miles of lines, many of which were main lines and which were, or could be, made profitable. 

 

It has now been totally forgotten that he was sacked by the Labour government after being accused by them, widely believed to be at the behest of the Transport & General Workers Union, of being pro rail. His crime was to illustrate the fact that a three lane motorway built to take 28 ton trucks cost almost twice that of a two lane motorway built to take 17 tonners. He therefore, correctly, proposed that the road transport industry should bear the extra costs of providing three lane motorways.

 

[C126]

Lots of good points have been made here, and far more articulately than I could.  May I just ask, as it has been nagging for a few years, 'Why did the Channel Tunnel prove a failure for Speedlink?'  I am sure it has been answered on this site elsewhere, for which I apologise for my dismal 'search skills', but surely European goods haulage, especially Spanish foods, could have been the saviour of a reduced Speedlink network into Britain.  If someone could enlighten me, I would be grateful.  It was not just the cost of anti-immigrant measures, was it?

 

On a more political moan, observing my fellow English subjects, I doubt any will vote for a worsening of their living conditions, in the sense of higher taxes and restrictions (of any sort) on their motor-cars or increases in costs of living.  Hence my retreat into a phantasy miniature world of blue and yellow locos, instead of waiting for a Green government to be elected...

[phil-b259]

On 07/05/2021 at 13:58, jonny777 said:

We used to have the makings of a decent rail freight business. It was called Speedlink, and many companies received grants to connect/upgrade their company sites to the network. Rail services ran at regular intervals, and picked up/dropped off wagons on the way

 

 

 

Which lost money hand over fist.

 

Hence repeated Beaching style cuts in the Speedlink network over its lifetime as traffic evaporated in favour of road transport until even the core network wasn't viable so it got shut completely.

 

Much the same process has gone on in continental Europe over the past decade as Governments strive to reduce losses being incurred by state owned operators.

 

 

[phil-b259]

15 minutes ago, C126 said:

Lots of good points have been made here, and far more articulately than I could.  May I just ask, as it has been nagging for a few years, 'Why did the Channel Tunnel prove a failure for Speedlink?' 

 

 

Speedlink got closed down 18 months or more before the Channel Tunnel opened!

 

Please remember that as far as UK Government policy in the late 80s / early 90s was concerned - Freight traffic (and InterCity rail services too for that matter) traffic should not be subsidised) and as such the railfreight division of British Rail was told it must turn a profit - axing loss making activities to do so if necessary.

 

 

 

 

[phil-b259]

22 hours ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

But I am not talking about purely UK traffic. I am talking about all the stuff coming from the south of Spain. It may well be that due to loading gauge constraint in Britain it would only get as far as Calais or Ashford. But that would already be a huge gain from a European perspective.

 

Thats extra transhipment costs hire of lorries and drivers at each end etc.

 

Far cheaper to employ a Eastern European truck driver on Eastern European wages (and whose pay is link to KMs driven rather than time taken) to truck it up to the UK

 

Simples!

[C126]

5 minutes ago, phil-b259 said:

 

Speedlink got closed down 18 months or more before the Channel Tunnel opened!

 

Please remember that as far as UK Government policy in the late 80s / early 90s was concerned - Freight traffic (and InterCity rail services too for that matter) traffic should not be subsidised) and as such the railfreight division of British Rail was told it must turn a profit - axing loss making activities to do so if necessary.

 

My thanks for correcting my dismal error!  I thought the dates overlapped slightly.  Am I right in thinking there are no 'wagon load' trains now running through from the continent if only as far as Willesden?  Is there any container traffic?  Am I plain wrong in thinking the Channel Tunnel could help at all?

[Fat Controller]

18 minutes ago, C126 said:

Lots of good points have been made here, and far more articulately than I could.  May I just ask, as it has been nagging for a few years, 'Why did the Channel Tunnel prove a failure for Speedlink?'  I am sure it has been answered on this site elsewhere, for which I apologise for my dismal 'search skills', but surely European goods haulage, especially Spanish foods, could have been the saviour of a reduced Speedlink network into Britain.  If someone could enlighten me, I would be grateful.  It was not just the cost of anti-immigrant measures, was it?

 

On a more political moan, observing my fellow English subjects, I doubt any will vote for a worsening of their living conditions, in the sense of higher taxes and restrictions (of any sort) on their motor-cars or increases in costs of living.  Hence my retreat into a phantasy miniature world of blue and yellow locos, instead of waiting for a Green government to be elected...

I worked at Eurotunnel for 25 years, until I retired last year; for most of that time, I was in the Railway Control Centre. When I started, there were often twenty or more National Freight trains on most days.

There was a lot of industrial action towards the end of the 1990s at SNCF; sometimes short-duration guerilla action, at other times, longer strikes. This caused a lot of hard-won flows to wither on the vine; most of the container flows were lost.

No sooner were things returning to a sort of normality, then the 'stowaway' crisis kicked off. I recollect night shifts when virtually no trains (neither NR nor Eurotunnel) ran during the hours of darkness. 

[phil-b259]

23 hours ago, 37114 said:

 

If you want a model of how rail can be used more, then Switzerland have shifted both the economic and legislative model to suit rail. I went to a stationery distribution warehouse near Geneva which had it's own siding for c 5 wagons. The site manager said basically rail was the only way they could despatch stock overnight and the economic restrictions in place suited rail over road.

 

 

 

And thats the nub of it.

 

It only happens because the Swiss Governments have put massive restrictions and extra costs on the use of road transport.

 

Doing that in the UK means not only taking on multiple vested interests who are politically well connected, it also means abandoning the central tenants of right wing political thinking - small, low regulation government and leaving as much as possible to 'the power of the free market'

 

Until that mindset changes road transport will dominate goods transport in the UK apart from specific situations which can be summarised that either transhipment is needed anyway (Containers off ships being transported to distribution centres at Daventry, Mosssend, etc) or bulk products.