Intermodal container trains

[iarnrod]

I am starting to gather stock together for container terminal type layout, possibly something along the lines of Nick Gurney's excellent Holland Park layout. I am based in Dublin, but have been doing quite a bit of research on the net re possible container types used on the different intermodal operator's trains in the UK. However, I have some questions that I would like to clear up before purchasing model containers and I'm hoping that someone here can help me.

 

I hope to model Freightliner trains, as with all the new wagon types due for release in the near future, it would allow for a bit of variety. My first question is do Freightliner trains ever carry 45' containers, such as the Bachmann type, on their trains as I can only find pictures of both 20' and 40' containers in the consist of Freightliner trains so far? Are 45' containers only carried by the likes of EWS and DRS?

 

Are you likely to see different freight carrying companies containers e.g Maersk, NYK Logistics, MSC in every terminal or do some freight carrying companies only operate from certain terminals/ports?

 

Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[AMJ]

There seem to be vast quantities of containers stacked up near to Stourton FL terminal in Leeds. They seem to be stacked in company groups and based on the sizes there are all lengths and heights.

 

There was a report of one of the high cubes being loaded onto an ordinary wagon at the International terminal at Whitwood (Castleford) that took out some of a canopy in southern England - in theory it should have caught on numerous bridges and tunnels before that.

[Bernard Lamb]

Take a look here at the bit called The Humble Box.

http://ukrailrollingstock.fotopic.net/

It should keep you busy for a few days and answer a lot of your questions.

Bernard

[Fat Controller]

Take a look here at the bit called The Humble Box.

http://ukrailrollingstock.fotopic.net/

It should keep you busy for a few days and answer a lot of your questions.

Bernard

To add to Bernard's response, try the following links:-

http://www.freightliner.co.uk/

http://www.rail.dbschenker.co.uk/services/network/intermodal.html

http://www.gbrailfreight.com/first-gbrf-intermodal-container-business-daily-container-services/p_96/

which will let you see what the various operators say about themselves.

The majority of Freightliner's wagon fleet is designed to handle containers in 10' modules, with fixed twistlock locations. They do hire in Megafrets, which can deal with 45' or 13.6m boxes, though with a loss of capacity in relation to train length.

GBRF's flats are all of a type intended for 10' modules, whilst DBS's fleet has some flexibility.

Shipping companies will serve as few ports as possible- in the UK, this will normally mean either Felixstowe or Southampton, with the same ships serving perhaps one mainland European port as well. Maersk have recently switched all their business from Southampton to Felixstowe, whilst I believe MSC's operations are also concentrated at Felixstowe.

There have been a few incidents of containers striking bridges, tunnels and other structures- part of the roof of Ipswich tunnel was discovered on top of a container at a depot in the North, in the days before the tunnel floor was lowered. The main routes from Southampton and Felixstowe are gradually being 'gauge-enhanced' to allow 9'6" boxes to be carried on 'normal' container wagons, rather than having to use either well wagons or wagons with small-wheeled bogies. Both are expensive to operate, having respectively lowered capacity or increased maintenance costs.

[kevindickerson]

 

Are you likely to see different freight carrying companies containers e.g Maersk, NYK Logistics, MSC in every terminal or do some freight carrying companies only operate from certain terminals/ports?

 

Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

This all depends upon which company owns the rail terminal and which TOC has the contract with which shipping line. Freightliner own a couple of terminals so it is unlikely you will ever see a DBS or GBRF in on of their terminals and hence the shipping containers of their customers. The two terminals at Felixstowe are owned by the port itself, therefore you will see Freightliner, GBRF & DBS all serving the terminal, it all makes for a more interesting variety of liveries, but they are still all hauled by sheds

 

Regards

Kevin

[Ravenser]

I am starting to gather stock together for container terminal type layout, possibly something along the lines of Nick Gurney's excellent Holland Park layout. I am based in Dublin, but have been doing quite a bit of research on the net re possible container types used on the different intermodal operator's trains in the UK. However, I have some questions that I would like to clear up before purchasing model containers and I'm hoping that someone here can help me.

 

I hope to model Freightliner trains, as with all the new wagon types due for release in the near future, it would allow for a bit of variety. My first question is do Freightliner trains ever carry 45' containers, such as the Bachmann type, on their trains as I can only find pictures of both 20' and 40' containers in the consist of Freightliner trains so far? Are 45' containers only carried by the likes of EWS and DRS?

 

Are you likely to see different freight carrying companies containers e.g Maersk, NYK Logistics, MSC in every terminal or do some freight carrying companies only operate from certain terminals/ports?

 

Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

Ok , some comments from a Line's perspective

 

45's are a pretty rare beast, a Maersk invention (the non-modular modular unit...)

 

There are certain restrictions. NYK is a Southampton carrier, with a couple of minor loops into Thamesport, and zilch into Felixstowe . Thus - for example - you will only ever see an NYK 40'high cube in a pocket wagon (ie Dapol KQA), because clearances to/from Southampton do not permit them to go on "normal" flats. And only small numbers of NYK boxes would turn up on Thamesport trains.

 

MSC , so far as I'm aware , is exclusively a Felixstowe carrier. They are also big enough to contract for entire trains - they and Maersk for example run Felixstowe /Bhm block trains , with nothing but their own boxes on. Others rely on contract wagons , so trains are a mixture of units

 

Maersk are largely a Felixstowe carrier , and I think may have pulled out of Southampton altogether

 

A quick look round various shipping lines' websites should give you an indication of who is serving which port (and you'll rapidly spot that most/all of these services are joint between 2-4 different lines ). I think there is also a list of trains somewhere on the FL website. The Southampton/Wilton(Cleveland) connection was knocked on the head about 2 years ago , so that's one terminal you won't see Southampton carriers' boxes.

 

London and the South East is overwhelmingly road haulage , and Birmingham can go either mode. S.Wales is likely to be road haulage for a Southampton carrier. Rail becomes dominant into the North of England

 

Bear in mind that small players are likely to be largely reliant on road as they won't have the volume to commit to contract wagons

 

GBRailfreight is basically a Felixstowe rail operator, and I think run some block trains for MSC

 

Hapag Lloyd are a Southampton carrier with significant Thamesport interests. OOCL are basically Southampton. Evergreen have a lot of vessels into Thamesport

[iarnrod]

Thanks for all the information guys. Much appreciated.

 

Just one last question.....how many Freightliner spine wagons have Dapol issued so far in 'OO' 4mm scale?

 

Thanks.

 

 

[JZ]

Southampton tunnel has been lowered to accept the Hi-cube containers, though I don't know how much else in the area has been done. I am working through there on Saturday morning, I'll try and remember to take a camera with me and get some pic's of what is about.

[Fat Controller]

Southampton tunnel has been lowered to accept the Hi-cube containers, though I don't know how much else in the area has been done. I am working through there on Saturday morning, I'll try and remember to take a camera with me and get some pic's of what is about.

Both roads through Southampton tunnel were done over Christmas, rather quicker than had been expected. There are issues with an aquaduct near Winchester, and some other structures (tunnels near Micheldever?) I believe.

[arran]

HI All

 

A pic of an ECS 45'X9'6" on an FEAb at Felixstowe.

 

Regards Arran

[iarnrod]

Arran,

 

Would you see 45's carried often on FEAB's or was that a rare occurence?

[arran]

Arran,

 

Would you see 45's carried often on FEAB's or was that a rare occurence?

 

 

HI

 

I wouldn't say its a rare occurrence, Ive seen about 7 x P&O Ferrymaster on one train, and Maersk 45ft Platewall containers one the Felixstowe trains, and Cronos ones going through Rugby, although I didn't realise it at the time it was only when going through my pics.

 

Ive seen 30ft Bulktainers and 30ft flour tanks as well like this http://arranaird.fotopic.net/p45830226.html

 

Regards Arran

[Ron Ron Ron]

Would you see 45's carried often on FEAB's or was that a rare occurence?

I wouldn't know one way or another, but I couldn't help noticing that Freightliner lists the container sizes that each wagon type is able to carry.

 

The FEA is shown as suitable for 20', 30' and 40ft containers.

45" containers are only listed for FLA (inner wagons only) and IKA wagons.

FEA, FSA/FTA, FLA (inner and outer), KFA and KTA, are all listed as being able to be loaded with various combinations of 20', 30' and 40' boxes.

IKA is listed to take all 4 sizes (20', 30', 40' and 45')

 

As I say, I've no idea how rigid these restrictions are.

 

Details here..... Freightliner Wagon fleet details

 

.

 

 

[Ron Ron Ron]

Southampton tunnel has been lowered to accept the Hi-cube containers, though I don't know how much else in the area has been done.......

Both roads through Southampton tunnel were done over Christmas, rather quicker than had been expected. There are issues with an aquaduct near Winchester, and some other structures (tunnels near Micheldever?) I believe.

I don't know of any aquaduct near Winchester (please correct me if I'm wrong). Are you thinking of the one just East of Farnborough (which isn't on the gauge enhanced route)?

 

There was a lot of discussion and news in the media about the Southampton tunnel in the run-up to the work being carried out and afterwards, but curiously nothing said about the 4 tunnels further up the line around Micheldever.

I assume work is required there too?

 

When the out-of-gauge incident (with the Hi-cube container incorrectly loaded on the wrong type of wagon) occurred, it was only noticed when the offending box ripped one of the Basingstoke platform canopies to bits.

By the time the train was brought to a halt, it had already passed through the first of these tunnels. The accident report stated that a walk through investigation revealed no damage, but clearance was literally a couple of inches.

The train was subsequently moved at walking pace with staff watching through the next tunnels to Micheldever sidings, where the 9' 6" container was loaded onto a lorry, before the train could resume its journey.

The surprising thing is that the 9' 6" box had made it all the way from up-country on a non-enhanced route without apparent damage anywhere else!

 

As for further gauge enhancement work on this route; I believe that a number of bridges in the Winchester area have been dealt with recently.

 

.

[Steadfast]

Something that can be seen from the photo of the ECS container Arran posted, is that 45's tend to have mounting points at both 40 and 45 ft positions.

The left hand end is secured on a "40ft" position, but you can't tell which they've used at the right hand end. Potentially, this could be a gap of 42.5 ft, which shows the flexibility of the FEA design, although obviously with only 15ft left, no other container can be carried

cheers

 

jo

[Ravenser]

I don't know of any aquaduct near Winchester (please correct me if I'm wrong). Are you thinking of the one just East of Farnborough (which isn't on the gauge enhanced route)?

 

There was a lot of discussion and news in the media about the Southampton tunnel in the run-up to the work being carried out and afterwards, but curiously nothing said about the 4 tunnels further up the line around Micheldever.

I assume work is required there too?

 

When the out-of-gauge incident (with the Hi-cube container incorrectly loaded on the wrong type of wagon) occurred, it was only noticed when the offending box ripped one of the Basingstoke platform canopies to bits.

By the time the train was brought to a halt, it had already passed through the first of these tunnels. The accident report stated that a walk through investigation revealed no damage, but clearance was literally a couple of inches.

The train was subsequently moved at walking pace with staff watching through the next tunnels to Micheldever sidings, where the 9' 6" container was loaded onto a lorry, before the train could resume its journey.

The surprising thing is that the 9' 6" box had made it all the way from up-country on a non-enhanced route without apparent damage anywhere else!

 

As for further gauge enhancement work on this route; I believe that a number of bridges in the Winchester area have been dealt with recently.

 

.

 

As of this moment, at least one Soton carrier is still working on the basis that pocket wagons (with higher costs and capacity issues) are still needed for 40'HCD

[iarnrod]

Hi Arran,

 

Speaking of 30' containers.......have you any plans to do these as RTR models?

 

Thanks.

[Edwin_m]

The surprising thing is that the 9' 6" box had made it all the way from up-country on a non-enhanced route without apparent damage anywhere else!

 

The gauging is a combination of worst cases in terms of the vehicle making its maximum sway and with worst case tolerances for things like wheel diameter and track position. Only if all these things happen at once will the vehicle move out to the limit of its gauge, and that is pretty rare. There's a programme under way somewhere to see if the gauging rules can be relaxed a bit for this very reason, though with the safety risk and operational disruption of an incident like this one I imagine they will still remain fairly cautious.

[Ron Ron Ron]

....but with an extra 12" in height, surely in that incident the box would have breached the Kinematic envelope, with some fairly close misses on the way?

 

 

As of this moment, at least one Soton carrier is still working on the basis that pocket wagons (with higher costs and capacity issues) are still needed for 40'HCD

There were 55 structures identified on this route that required attention. Until the whole route is cleared pocket wagons and low-liners will probably continue.

 

An interesting bit of info I read that may be useful for anyone contemplating what boxes to place on their scale wagons.

At Southampton, almost 50% of the containers used are now of the 9" 6" variety !

Only 28% of containers handled are moved to/from the port by rail !

 

.

[Glorious NSE]

I hope to model Freightliner trains, as with all the new wagon types due for release in the near future, it would allow for a bit of variety. My first question is do Freightliner trains ever carry 45' containers, such as the Bachmann type, on their trains as I can only find pictures of both 20' and 40' containers in the consist of Freightliner trains so far? Are 45' containers only carried by the likes of EWS and DRS?

 

Freightliner currently use:

 

FEA-B 60' flats, paired sets

FEA-E 60' single flats (bumped from engineers traffic by NR cuts)

FLA Lowliner 40' paired/multi-set low deck wagons

FSA/FTA 60' flats (FSA outer, FTA inner)

KFA 60' flats

KTA 40' pocket wagons

IKA megafrets (AFAIK only in regular use on Ditton-Mossend trains?)

 

AFAIK 45's can only be carried on FEA-B sets, the FEA-B has an extra set of spigots offset from the normal spacing to support the 40' stacking posts. As 45's are virtually exclusively high cube they can only move on gauge enhanced routes so you will not see 45's on Freightliner out of Southampton.

 

Here's one of the nice older Maersk aluminium boxes as an example:

http://thehumblebox..../p55341389.html

 

Ref the FLAs, the early inner wagons theoretically would be able to take them, but there is a big loading guide welded onto the deck at the 40' mark which I think will prevent them from loading anything over a 40' on them, despite what it says on the FL website - if there's a way around that i'm interested to hear.

 

Are you likely to see different freight carrying companies containers e.g Maersk, NYK Logistics, MSC in every terminal or do some freight carrying companies only operate from certain terminals/ports?

 

Certain shipping companies do use certain ports (although there are all sorts of agreements in place where boxes can use another companies ship which can mean there is some variety) - but many terminals have trains coming from more than one port - so for example if you had a theoretical, fictional Freightliner terminal in the Midlands you could have solid sets of 60' flats including high cubes and an occasional 45' coming from Felixstowe, and a train featuring a mix of standard boxes on flats and high-cubes in pockets/lowliners from Southampton

 

Going a stage further if the intermodal terminal is privately operated (not owned by Freightliner) then it might receive trains from more than one company as well.

 

Example - Hams Hall see's trains from Colas, EWS and GBRf - and Birch Coppice sees trains from both EWS and Freightliner

 

In terms of boxes/ports for deep-sea traffic, as a rough guide i'd say:

 

Felixstowe - MSC, Maersk, Cosco, China Shipping, Evergreen, Hamburg-Sud, Hanjin

Tilbury - Hapag Lloyd, CMA-CGM

Thamesport - Evergreen, APL, MOL

Southampton - APL, NYK, Hapag Lloyd, OOCL

 

All of those would be the normal mix of 40' and 20' boxes. You can add a random sprinkling of leasers such as TEX, Triton, TAL, GOLD - plus a tanktainer or two.

 

But as I said before, there's all sorts of reasons why they might be going to/from somewhere else.

 

Something that can be seen from the photo of the ECS container Arran posted, is that 45's tend to have mounting points at both 40 and 45 ft positions.

The left hand end is secured on a "40ft" position, but you can't tell which they've used at the right hand end. Potentially, this could be a gap of 42.5 ft, which shows the flexibility of the FEA design, although obviously with only 15ft left, no other container can be carried

 

Suspect they will be using the offset 40' location on the FEAs - it does waste the 15' of space on the wagon though, the only wagon type in the UK optimised to be able to move 45's is the new Davis "super low 45" wagon, DRS has had a play with the prototype, and GBRf are currently experimenting with it on their Felixstowe-Selby train.

[Ravenser]

GloriousNSE

Felixstowe - MSC, Maersk, Cosco, China Shipping, Evergreen, Hamburg-Sud, Hanjin

Tilbury - Hapag Lloyd, CMA-CGM

Thamesport - Evergreen, APL, MOL

Southampton - APL, NYK, Hapag Lloyd, OOCL

 

 

To get slightly technical , all Grand Alliance Far East loops call Southampton, as does one of the 3 Transatlantic loops (the GA currently comprises HL,NYK, OOCL - MISC withdrew from the trade last year). The other 2 GA Transatlantic loops call Thamesport. The Grand Alliance is in an exchange agreement to the Far East with the New World Alliance (APL Hyundai, MOL) and each side has space on the other's vessels. 2 of the NWA FE loops call Southampton, and one Thamesport. I'm a bit hazy about NWA Transatlantic activities , but a poke around on the Hyundai Merchant Marine site suggests two loops out of Flx, one joint with Maersk

 

So you'd see all 6 carriers in Southampton on a large scale, all 6 in Thamesport on a much smaller scale, and 3 of them (APL/HMM/MOL) in Felixstowe on a moderate scale

 

CMA-CGM's main Far East/Middle East service is from Southampton : it's the Indian Subcontinent and Middle East service that uses Tilbury (and it looks as if United Arab have some space on that as well)

 

Otherwise UASC are exclusively a Felixstowe carrier

[Edwin_m]

....but with an extra 12" in height, surely in that incident the box would have breached the Kinematic envelope, with some fairly close misses on the way?

 

There were 55 structures identified on this route that required attention.

 

You have sort of answered your own question here. The total mileage of those 55 structures, even if a few of them are tunnels, are only a small proportion of the route length and the rest of the route is OK for the larger gauge. So if a single container sways once outside the permitted envelope it's relatively unlikely to hit anything. It would be a different story if every wagon of every train was similarly loaded.

 

The RAIB report into Basingstoke included a very through investigation of the loading and checking procedures to understand how a forbidden container-wagon combination had been loaded on that train. As is usual with these reports considers previous incidents, of which there were very few confirmed but suspicion that a number of over-height containers had made it all the way to Southampton without being damaged (the platform usually used at Basingstoke has better clearances). This suggests that the gauging process is indeed rather cautious - but is it reasonably cautious or unduly over-cautious?

[arran]

Hi Arran,

 

Speaking of 30' containers.......have you any plans to do these as RTR models?

 

Thanks.

 

HI All

 

I did ask after the success of the tanks, but they didn't think it would work as they tried some to see how they got on assembling them.

 

Might do a differant tank after I've done the 40ft Highcube refer, the design work has started on this so there will be cad stuff next by late summer, that will be worth looking at.

 

Regards Arran

[The Stationmaster]

 

 

The surprising thing is that the 9' 6" box had made it all the way from up-country on a non-enhanced route without apparent damage anywhere else!

 

However when work recently started (and then stopped due to some clown getting it Listed) on an overbridge just east of Pangbourne evidence was found of 'countless' container strikes with the arch on the Up Relief Line

[Glorious NSE]

Hiya Ravenser, kicking myself for not mentioning Hyundai at Thamesport at least, last Monday's 4O88 was an all-Hyundai consist!