Railway Parcels (the system, rather than the trains)

[flubrush]

The British film industry depended on Red Star.   The major film processing laboratories were based in London and film was sent daily from locations all over Britain by Red Star.   One of the first acts when setting up a location was to establish the closest station with a London service and the latest train time for a delivery to London in late evening of the same day.   The film laboratories had a regular van service which trawled round the London Red Star stations from early evening picking up whatever had arrived.    And then for regional film or television centres,  there was the reverse delivery of processed film from London back to them by Red Star the following day.   It was possible to have film rushes sent from Inverness at lunchtime one day and the processed film back in BBC Glasgow the following afternoon/evening.

 

There were the occasional problems and some Red Star stations were better than others.   But in the main it worked very well and millions of feet of film were transported in this way every year.

 

Jim.

Edited December 17, 2022 by flubrush

[The Stationmaster]

So BR parcels operations - which takes me back quite a few years.  arcels traffic was passenger rated and conveyed by weither passenger or dedicated parcels trains.  the way it worked originally - in the days when most stations could send and receive parcels traffic was that it would be sorted at larger stations because obviously a lot of the. traffic didn't follow the same w route as a single train.   thus intermediate sorting, or at elast transfer from one train to another was an integral part of the way the traffic was worked.  london was an even bigger mess because until. i think, the very early 1960s each region's London termini which handled parcels traffic de;ivered throughout central lomndon - thos was resolved by concentrating traffdic for teh various Postal Districts onto a terminus b near at hand for those d Districts - which of course also implied greater inter-Regional transfer of parcels traffic,

 

Inter Regional working was based around a network of, mainly Parcels Trains - many of which also conveyed Parcel Post and, in some cases Letter Mail as well. The latter inr troduced additional handling delienations which could make things more difficult with both BR and Post Officr staff trying to simultaneously work on the same train.   The 1960s saw a whole host of changes in a bid to make handling far more efficient with concentration of interchange sorting onto fewer locations, removal of parcels facilities from many smaller stations replacing that by zonal road collection and delivery (which had started as far back as the 1930s).  in some places - especially where the large mail order companies operated specific de[ots were deve;loped to handle that traffic with the idea of providing as many through (rail) vans as possible to reduce intermediate sorting handling.  in addition some classes of parv cels traffic were either lost to road or deliberately shed after the railway's Common Carrier obligation was ended.

 

The various Regions varied in their practices to improve efficiency but on the WR, and at least one other Region, it became fashionablre to try to concentrate part of teh parcels and freight smalls operation ontoa single depot.  sometimes this might only be for Collection andDelivery purposes usinga. common vehicle fleet but sometimes the depot might be handling both freight and parcels traffic simply loading them to the relevant rail vehicle to go forward.  the break up of Freight sundries (the modern name for 'goods smalls' out of BR to National carriers meant a lot of these arrangements had to be undone over following years.  Anither key feature of thus change was that. Br lost its road C&D fleet (reputedly the largest C&D fleet in Britain at that time) to NCL and vehicles were henceforth hired in from NCL - at a less than ideal price but with no easy option of getting out of the arrangement. (you had to prove that NCL were truly awful at doing teh kjob in order to even start a process of trying to get iout of using them and i don't know if anywhere ever succeeded in completely getting shot of them for parcels C&D.

 

Thius when i was an area Manger in 1978 I had a parcels C&D fleet of 16 vehicles. (Commer walk through type) hired from NCL and driven by NCL employees with NCL taking also some of the round arrangement work as well.  And in order to reduce my costs for C&D I ghad t prove to NCL that they were using too many vehicles - an idea they didn't like but I got the fleet down to 14 by reversng the process and tellin g them that they had to prove that I needed 16 vehicles (they couldn't).  So we were back from the pre NCL situation of outwards traffic being unloaded at the combined goods and parcels shed to it being unloaded at the stations (which actually still handled parcels) by my platform staff who sorted it to the correct vans for trains and the mandated vans which we 'made' to match our normal pattern of outwards traffic.  But the inwards rounds were still sorted by NCL staff.

 

Red Star f course avoided the NCL cost element so it was gradually and increasingly developed up to the years when BR finally bit the bullet and completely withdrew fronm the C&D parcels business and the large costs and difficult pattern of management which it entailed.  By then I suspect the number of BR staff in moddle, and toa lesser ecxtent senior, management who really understood how to manage a C&D fleet was increasingly shrinking.  So it was no bad idea to get out of something that BR didn't wholly control and didn't have much of the expertise to act as 'an informed buyer' of the service provided by NCL or whatever it had changed irs name to by then.  I'd in some respects been lucky - I'd learnt at an early stage on a course, and later by practical experience, about how to manage a road C&D fleet and i understood from practical experience at several levels and various different angles how parcels traffic could be most efficiently dealt with.  that sort of exerience wasn't really available to folk who joined after the formation of NCL when a lot of what was involved went out of BR's day-to-day hands.