HS2

[Mark Saunders]

3 minutes ago, lmsforever said:

Go to the Bucks Herald news website and look at the activity by HS2 workers not abiding by the guidelines on being outside  a gathering of above five of them and one of them sneezing and coughing caught on camera.Not good and what do HS2 say not our problem very bad guidelines must be obeyed.

 

If you are that concerned report your concerns to the HSE rather than blather on this topic; however if it is shut down you can winge on later about overrun and even more overbudget!

 

 

[Mark Saunders]

8 minutes ago, lmsforever said:

You stupid ignorant person this was not to do with stopping HS2 but the fact that the contractors shown have not had the correct advice and are putting themselves in danger. bbish.

 

Read what you have written in the past!

 

You have form!

[62613]

51 minutes ago, lmsforever said:

Go to the Bucks Herald news website and look at the activity by HS2 workers not abiding by the guidelines on being outside  a gathering of above five of them and one of them sneezing and coughing caught on camera.Not good and what do HS2 say not our problem very bad guidelines must be obeyed.

Lmsforever in "I don't know how the construction industry works" shocker. HS2 Ltd. has no responsibilty for the H & S for  the workers on the ground. Most of those will probably self-employed or limited companies, who are working via an agency, and as such are contracted to the various companies actually piecing the job together. HSE law makes it clear that as such, they are responsible for their own H & S. At the moment they have a dilemma; do they carry on working for as long as they can, or throw themselves on the tender mercies of the Social Security system? The minimum 5-week wait for your first Universal Credit payment has not been waived.

 

Edited March 25, 2020 by 62613

[Clearwater]

I spent a fair amount of my time looking at the relative competitiveness of road vs rail from container ports.  Whether it is delays in turning around in port or the distance, it is rare to see a journey distance of less than 150 miles being competitively undertaken by rail as opposed to road. DPW publish rail routes from the container terminals they operate: https://www.dpworldsouthampton.com/why-us/onward-distribution/rail-connections

 

Interesting to see that some routes are from port to port (eg Teesport).  Wentloog is also close to Bristol, Newport and Cardiff.  Effectively what you;ve got happening is the deep sea ports (Southampton, London Gateway and Rotterdam) competing for the same ex-China traffic.  Those boxes can get to the North East either via feeder services from Rotterdam or via rail within the UK.  Logistics managers and freight forwarders will be weighing up the relative cost of taking a cheap slot on a s15/16000 TEU ship going into Rotterdam plus the cost of extra handling of the feeder over the North Sea relative to the cost of a direct call on a smaller ship (say 10,000 TEU to illustrate) where cost/box may be higher plus the intra UK transfer.

 

 There are a number of factors to consider (note these include some generalisations):

1) total drive time and shift pattern of truck drivers.  If you can do out and back in say 4h, you can do 2 trips, 2h 4 trips etc.  

2) rail journey time. Some freight journeys, because of network constraints, loading gauges, passenger trains etc etc can be materially longer than the equivalent road journey. 

3) Multiple handling of the box.  If you put a box on a train at the container port, that’s one lift from ship to stack and one from stack to train.  There’s then another one from train to stack at the inland terminal.  There’s also likely another lift from stack at terminal onto road for the last 10 miles delivery.  If you compare to road, there would be only a lift from stack to truck at the container port.  Thus the rail journey has to have a greater saving than those extra lifts even to break even with road

4) Container trains are typically assumed to carry around 30 boxes.  If you’ve not got 30 boxes that want to go to that exact destination, then you’ve got an extra fixed cost per box to cover across the boxes you do carry.  When you break down the number of boxes per year onto a per day basis, you may find insufficient demand to go to a given terminal

5) Train hire tends to be for say a 6m period.  Therefore you have to have services for 5 days a week and hence the demand else you’ll be adding to your overhead.  Rail cost structures are relatively inflexible compared to road

6) building on point 3, if your box is going to go by road for the last 10 miles, then why take it 10 miles beyond where it needs to go by rail only to bring back to a point 10 miles closer to the port?

7) Rail tends to have better / clearer charges at point of use for each portion of infrastructure used.  We don’t, yet, properly charge for road access in the UK.

8) I think there is also an issue with some of the older inland terminal (not sure if Lawley St or Wentloog have this issue) in that they can’t take the longer container trains.  Again this disadvantages rail on an economy of scale.  A 500m train will still need one loco, three drivers per 24h etc compared to a 750m train.

 

MGRs worked, as do other dry bulks such as biomass, iron ore etc, because you are delivering a high volume, high density comparatively low value product between two fixed points.  Containers is a 1 to many relationship in the main (you can find examples to contradict but they are comparatively small compared to the overall number of containers and truck traffic).  Also, do the maths on how many road journeys would be needed to take 10 million ton of iron ore and coke per year from Immingham to Scunthorpe.  There’s a reason BS only kept its coastal steel mills as steel production capacity reduced in the UK.

 

There was a mention of canals - many of the same multiple handling and destination inflexibility points also apply.

 

David

 

[Clearwater]

1 hour ago, jjb1970 said:

 

Southampton is a terrible place for a container port, right in the centre of a City (although good for shore leave). The number of containers entering and leaving even a modest container terminal like Southampton is huge and it adds an awful lot of truck movements to the local road system. A few European box terminals have the same problem, newer terminals tend to be built in the middle of nowhere partly because it tends to be cheaper but more importantly for easy of the land side logistic chain. Not much good for crews going ashore though. 

 

I understand the maritime access is quite good, depth of water plus the double tide, plus small deviation from the Channel Shipping lanes.  The UK only really has three deep sea container ports (Felixstowe, Southampton and Gateway).  Other ports with the water involve too longer diversions (eg Bristol, Teesport).

[lmsforever]

21 minutes ago, Mark Saunders said:

 

Read what you have written in the past!

 

You have form!

So do you

[Fat Controller]

1 hour ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

Excellent location for a container port. It's the city that is in the wrong place.

 

Seriously though, access to the port from the M27 is pretty good. Not much impact at all on "local" roads. 

Every so often, the idea of a new container port on the Fawley/ Marchwood side of the water is mooted. How would this fit in with road traffic?

[jjb1970]

50 minutes ago, Clearwater said:

 

I understand the maritime access is quite good, depth of water plus the double tide, plus small deviation from the Channel Shipping lanes.  The UK only really has three deep sea container ports (Felixstowe, Southampton and Gateway).  Other ports with the water involve too longer diversions (eg Bristol, Teesport).

 

From a purely maritime perspective Southampton is a good port. Deepwater access although the run in isn't idea as it is quite confined (although at times of the year the yachts give pilots and masters nervous stress) and it is on the Channel so adjacent to the principal shipping lane for North Europe. It is more that putting ports in city centre locations is not ideal (I know that for mature ports cities grew around the port and it is a legacy issue). Aside from onward logistics it tends to confine the scope to expand terminals and quay length and it is not ideal in terms of local air quality given the high emissions from ships (particularly NOx, and even for SOx marine fuel sulphur limits are still massively higher than automotive and industrial fuels). 

[Joseph_Pestell]

16 minutes ago, Fat Controller said:

Every so often, the idea of a new container port on the Fawley/ Marchwood side of the water is mooted. How would this fit in with road traffic?

 

Not great. I doubt if building a new dual carriageway through the New Forest would go down well.

 

But there is already a railway line.

[The Stationmaster]

35 minutes ago, Clearwater said:

 

I understand the maritime access is quite good, depth of water plus the double tide, plus small deviation from the Channel Shipping lanes.  The UK only really has three deep sea container ports (Felixstowe, Southampton and Gateway).  Other ports with the water involve too longer diversions (eg Bristol, Teesport).

Not quite the case.  The maintained (by dredging) low water depth in the final part of the Solent approach and in Southampton Water itself varies between 13.2 metres (Southampton Water) and 13.6 metres in the maintained channel in the Solent and the latter has. an extremely difficult turn for large container vessels (photo available on page 1 of the thread linked below).  The maintained depth for the approaches to London Gateway is 14 metres and the maintained dept for the approaches to Felixstowe is 14.5 metres. both of the latter involve turns but neither are anything like as awkward as the turn in the Solent.  

 

The only real advantages that Southampton has as a container port are that it is easily accessed from the English Channel shipping lanes so is an overall time saver for ships to/from up Channel/North Sea ports on the European mainland.  And it has good quality main line rail access with a reasonable selection of alternative routes should the main arteries be blocked for any reason plus fairly good road access.  But the for the largest vessels - such as the one seen the thread linked below, which draws 16 metres at full it is tide dependent for access which can result in ships being delayed, not unusual to see container ships waiting off the Nab for a chance to get in and dock. 

 

https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/147506-yes-we-were-back-on-the-briny-again-august-2019/&tab=comments#comment-3669524

 

[lmsforever]

London Gateway  seems to thriving considering its close to Tilbury shows how we need capacity.

[Clearwater]

1 minute ago, lmsforever said:

London Gateway  seems to thriving considering its close to Tilbury shows how we need capacity.

London Gateway offers faster unloading, better storage facilities and can accommodate deeper drafted vessels.  They are not really comparable as facilities.

[Zomboid]

2 hours ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

Not great. I doubt if building a new dual carriageway through the New Forest would go down well.

 

But there is already a railway line.

The new forest national park doesn't go all the way to the Solent though. Cawley, Hythe and Marchwood are not especially beautiful places, though they mostly wouldn't be enhanced by a container port.

 

There's not really anywhere else along the south coast that would offer the onward road and rail connections that the Southampton area does.

[black and decker boy]

HS2 and it’s contractors announced today they are pausing most worksites until COVID-19 restrictions lifted.

[runs as required]

Totally OT in this fierce thread, but here goes:

At the end of a long contract in Ghana in the mid 1970s with a young family, a still presentable VW Baywindow Dormobile (with its steering wheel the wrong side), and nowhere to stay except in the van, wife and I took the BA overnight airfare and used it to buy deck space for the van and 'as long as it takes' accommodation on a Black Star Line timber ship from Takoradi into the northern hemisphere .

 

The piled up cargo of hardwood logs had not yet found a buyer when we sailed; but they assured us economics were against ending up in Northern America but anywhere in Europe and into the Black Sea or the Baltic was possible. 

It took 3 months, the engine's cylinders nd piston rings were changed drifting in a flat calm sea off Cape Verde and we sailed slowly past possible options (like into the Med) until things got really serious after rounding Ushant.

The Captain sobered up and appeared in his full uniform and concentrated hard through the channel with stuff zapping around us in terrifying 'close calls'.

After dinner that night he announced to his dozen passengers with great ceremony that he had finally heard we would be docking in Rotterdam in the morning.

We woke up to find we were an hour down the canal into Amsterdam.

"Rotterdam or Amsterdam it is all the same to me" he roared "We shall be at sea again in just as long as it takes to turn around".

dh

 

[Mike Storey]

7 hours ago, Mark Saunders said:

Sounds like the Tyne Tunnel that would never pay for itself but not that long ago they built a second one! 
The phrase, there are those who know the Cost of everything and value of nothing.

 

 

 

The "value" of the freight only railway, apart from the much improved link at the Rotterdam end (which did not actually form part of the new railway, and are indeed being improved yet again), was the object of the Dutch NAO study. The fact that the Germans did not go ahead with their portion of the route (although they did initiate some other improvements), says it all.

 

The cost was the cost. End of.

 

What was at stake was the imperative to do this ahead of major improvements to the passenger network. Dutch Railways (NS) have form on this, which included the sacking (and prosecution of a few) of a number of executives for fraud, back in the Noughties and later. The justification was the need to remove freight from the classic network before such improvements could be undertaken,  But the major and prolonged hiatus to passenger services during the subsequent passenger line upgrades (and still continuing) including the High Speed sections, did not seem to matter. Surely, from a user viewpoint, it would have been better to build a new passenger line, before attempting the rest? Or have I missed something, in your implied criticism?

[Mike Storey]

4 hours ago, Clearwater said:

I spent a fair amount of my time looking at the relative competitiveness of road vs rail from container ports.  Whether it is delays in turning around in port or the distance, it is rare to see a journey distance of less than 150 miles being competitively undertaken by rail as opposed to road. DPW publish rail routes from the container terminals they operate: https://www.dpworldsouthampton.com/why-us/onward-distribution/rail-connections

 

Interesting to see that some routes are from port to port (eg Teesport).  Wentloog is also close to Bristol, Newport and Cardiff.  Effectively what you;ve got happening is the deep sea ports (Southampton, London Gateway and Rotterdam) competing for the same ex-China traffic.  Those boxes can get to the North East either via feeder services from Rotterdam or via rail within the UK.  Logistics managers and freight forwarders will be weighing up the relative cost of taking a cheap slot on a s15/16000 TEU ship going into Rotterdam plus the cost of extra handling of the feeder over the North Sea relative to the cost of a direct call on a smaller ship (say 10,000 TEU to illustrate) where cost/box may be higher plus the intra UK transfer.

 

 There are a number of factors to consider (note these include some generalisations):

1) total drive time and shift pattern of truck drivers.  If you can do out and back in say 4h, you can do 2 trips, 2h 4 trips etc.  

2) rail journey time. Some freight journeys, because of network constraints, loading gauges, passenger trains etc etc can be materially longer than the equivalent road journey. 

3) Multiple handling of the box.  If you put a box on a train at the container port, that’s one lift from ship to stack and one from stack to train.  There’s then another one from train to stack at the inland terminal.  There’s also likely another lift from stack at terminal onto road for the last 10 miles delivery.  If you compare to road, there would be only a lift from stack to truck at the container port.  Thus the rail journey has to have a greater saving than those extra lifts even to break even with road

4) Container trains are typically assumed to carry around 30 boxes.  If you’ve not got 30 boxes that want to go to that exact destination, then you’ve got an extra fixed cost per box to cover across the boxes you do carry.  When you break down the number of boxes per year onto a per day basis, you may find insufficient demand to go to a given terminal

5) Train hire tends to be for say a 6m period.  Therefore you have to have services for 5 days a week and hence the demand else you’ll be adding to your overhead.  Rail cost structures are relatively inflexible compared to road

6) building on point 3, if your box is going to go by road for the last 10 miles, then why take it 10 miles beyond where it needs to go by rail only to bring back to a point 10 miles closer to the port?

7) Rail tends to have better / clearer charges at point of use for each portion of infrastructure used.  We don’t, yet, properly charge for road access in the UK.

8) I think there is also an issue with some of the older inland terminal (not sure if Lawley St or Wentloog have this issue) in that they can’t take the longer container trains.  Again this disadvantages rail on an economy of scale.  A 500m train will still need one loco, three drivers per 24h etc compared to a 750m train.

 

MGRs worked, as do other dry bulks such as biomass, iron ore etc, because you are delivering a high volume, high density comparatively low value product between two fixed points.  Containers is a 1 to many relationship in the main (you can find examples to contradict but they are comparatively small compared to the overall number of containers and truck traffic).  Also, do the maths on how many road journeys would be needed to take 10 million ton of iron ore and coke per year from Immingham to Scunthorpe.  There’s a reason BS only kept its coastal steel mills as steel production capacity reduced in the UK.

 

There was a mention of canals - many of the same multiple handling and destination inflexibility points also apply.

 

David

 

 

Some of the issues you cite are long out of date. For example, the nature of 6 monthly contracts - that only applies to half or full load trains "run as required" (or more likely timetabled) these days. The economics of that are well archived and strongly in favour of rail, over road, in most long distance cases.

 

However, the general gist is accepted - the primary consideration is whether to dock in the UK or trans-ship from Rotterdam (or increasingly Hamburg). Smaller ships transiting direct from the Far East are far less economic, full stop, and especially now - I suspect several such operators will go bust over this period (rates already having dropped significantly, well before this bad cold virus).

 

The issue then becomes that of less-than-trainload shipments. That is an area where rail has become much more competitive in the past five years, especially with the Freight Track Access charging regime for CP5. The primary consideration, of multiple trans-shipments versus road, is less of an issue than it once was, especially with the advent of many new inland "international" rail-connected depots. But apparently, this is not enough, and the explosion of road-based solutions into the UK from Rotterdam, and even Calais, suggest that the road lobby are not giving up yet.

 

But one wonders, at the margins they must be operating, how much longer this can last.

[Pete the Elaner]

4 hours ago, Fat Controller said:

Every so often, the idea of a new container port on the Fawley/ Marchwood side of the water is mooted. How would this fit in with road traffic?

That seems ironic really.

Many coastal cities grew from ports when shipping was the major form of overseas transport.

We seem to have moved on so as the cities grew with the aid of roads, the ports which started them now seem to be in the way.

[Pete the Elaner]

1 hour ago, black and decker boy said:

HS2 and it’s contractors announced today they are pausing most worksites until COVID-19 restrictions lifted.

Back on topic.

 

The only sensible decision. This is not a vital project right now.

It 10 years time, when the project is still 3 years away (& therefore late) due to this & several other issues which we will probably not have even imagined yet, will a few months lost now really seem like such an issue?

The date will have changed several times & we will all be asking "when was it originally intended to be finished" & few will remember.

[Clearwater]

11 minutes ago, Pete the Elaner said:

Back on topic.

 

The only sensible decision. This is not a vital project right now.

It 10 years time, when the project is still 3 years away (& therefore late) due to this & several other issues which we will probably not have even imagined yet, will a few months lost now really seem like such an issue?

The date will have changed several times & we will all be asking "when was it originally intended to be finished" & few will remember.

Sorry but there will need to be a stimulus to the economy.  This is ready to go and to spend and creates immediate jobs in the construction sector.

[Mike Storey]

12 minutes ago, Pete the Elaner said:

 

It 10 years time, when the project is still 3 years away (& therefore late) due to this & several other issues which we will probably not have even imagined yet, will a few months lost now really seem like such an issue?

The date will have changed several times & we will all be asking "when was it originally intended to be finished" & few will remember.

 

except the NAO.......

[Mike Storey]

Just now, Clearwater said:

Sorry but there will need to be a stimulus to the economy.  This is ready to go and to spend and creates immediate jobs in the construction sector.

 

Well yes, but not at the expense of several thousand more people dying, surely?

[billbedford]

It is not entirely clear that there have been any excess deaths over what would have normally been expected. 

[Clearwater]

12 minutes ago, Mike Storey said:

 

Well yes, but not at the expense of several thousand more people dying, surely?

To me, keeping HS2 is part of the economic stimulus required post the end of the immediate crisis. Cancelling the project now would, in my view, be a strange and counterproductive view.  Cancelling wouldn’t help any construction company and their supply chain in their discussions  lenders/investors who could otherwise point to the future revenues from the HS2 project.

[black and decker boy]

16 minutes ago, billbedford said:

It is not entirely clear that there have been any excess deaths over what would have normally been expected. 

The whole point of the current measures is to avoid the predicted 260,000 deaths in the U.K. 

 

the restrictions are not a personal slight just to stop people having fun, getting pissed and beating up their wifes.

 

best to see how things unfold than take pot shots with no ammunition