Do Intermodal container trains from uk ports run on Sundays and bank holidays?

[Satan's Goldfish]

As the topic says.

 

Debating doing some line side 'research' but don't want it to be a waste of a day. I've always noticed a lack of container lorries on the A14 on Sundays, do rail services stop too? Specifically ones on the line up from Southampton through Oxford.

 

Thanks

[Saltersbrook]

There's a distinct drop in the number of lorries on most roads Saturday afternoons/Sundays. It's the weekend and even lorry drivers have families to go home to, as well as a lot of industries being closed because their workers also like a day or two off.

[Satan's Goldfish]

Personally i'm in a 24/7 job and lose track of what day of the week it is. Was unsure with the fact that the ships don't stop sailing if it's night or a weekend whether the flow of containers out by rail would be the same?

[roundhouse]

There are no booked freight trains through Banbury on a Sunday although there well may be Network Rail trains if tree is engineering work on nearby.

 

Ian

[Satan's Goldfish]

Cheers Ian, that covers the line i was going to. Ah well, will have to be a mid week trip.

[trisonic]

Come over here! Double Stackers run 24/7/365 days of the year! The idea of stopping over the weekend would seem ludicrous to the railroad, freight and port industry...

Even the subway, commuter lines and buses run through Christmas Day too.

Bit like Britain up to the Sixties really.

 

Best, Pete.

[Glorious NSE]

SG - Most intermodals run on kinda an offset 5 day cycle - trains ramping up to full strength on a Monday morning, then running through till Saturday morning - by Saturday afternoon most are terminating (or terminated) for the weekend, so go out on a Tuesday to a Friday for the most trains...

 

Bank holiday workings can vary, you may get some, but my experience is that **mostly** intermodals then run on a Tuesday to the 'ramp up' timetable they would have done on the Monday...

 

Freightliners do usually run on all 'normal' days though, including for example the ones between Christmas and New Year....

 

Pete - the relative lack of multi-day transits is the big difference here, in the US you have a lot of traffic shipped on Fridays to arrive in time for a Monday, Mondays are usually your quietest day of the week traffic-wise. Over here if a shipper wants to ship a 'time critical' item on a Friday to arrive for Monday the train is there by Saturday lunchtime, so less (although not 'no') demand for 24/7 running for 'time critical' shipments.

 

Most of the US also has traffic levels which allow for regular maintainence windows between trains, not so easy here.

 

For example at what point in the working week do you do maintainence on critical infrastructure like the Felixstowe branch (single track, 60 freights per 24 hrs, plus two passenger trains an hour) - at least this gives you a regular window for a maintainence blockade if needed, without disrupting any of the critical (freight) traffic?

[beast66606]

As Martyn mentioned it traffic on the Felixstowe branch dies out during late Saturday afternoon with a couple of "empties" (these are mostly loaded) back to Ipswich yard. They keep mentioning introducing Sunday workings but it's not happened yet. Bank holidays are generally dead.

[TheSignalEngineer]

This is a starting point for booked paths. IIRC the GE freight services covering Felixstowe are in Section LD.

 

The short term plan and variations are usually available at http://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/advanced

[trisonic]

Martyn,

Felixstowe is a victim of it's own success - it needs more track. I don't buy the maintenance thing.....(well, not much, anyway).

 

When you got a country the size of a continent and you're shipping from one coast to another it takes longer than Friday to Monday........what you do not find over here are Intermodal trains sitting around when they could be going somewhere. The ports still work seven days a week.

On the LeHigh track near me (one of the main double-stack entry points to NY/NJ Port Authority) the busiest day is Sunday early AM.

 

Best, Pete.

[Glorious NSE]

Martyn,

Felixstowe is a victim of it's own success - it needs more track. I don't buy the maintenance thing.....(well, not much, anyway).

 

I certainly agree it's a 'could do better' (the same is true on the passenger side of things) - but you do need to do heavy work from time to time - and that's much, much easier without all these pesky trains about, especially when they expect a defined-to-the-minute timetable rather than a 'rough' ballpark schedule as all US roads use, even on intermodal traffic!

 

Not perfect, but it's arguable the 5 day freight railway is the 'least worst' option however.

 

But yep - in any sane world they would have at least a little more track down there to play with!

 

When you got a country the size of a continent and you're shipping from one coast to another it takes longer than Friday to Monday........what you do not find over here are Intermodal trains sitting around when they could be going somewhere. The ports still work seven days a week.

 

How many coast to coast intermodal trains are there? Is it still just the 1 pair of NJ-Cal trains for UPS? Most trains will be doing something like Chicago-West Coast (about 3 days on a fast schedule - so i'd presume 2 for fast schedules to East Coast destinations?) - even if some of the traffic on it connects (sometimes rubber tyred!) from beyond that.

 

We also get better equipment utilisation (trains and terminals) doing it our way, although its arguably a lot worse in terms of running track capacity (the other side of that coin is would anyone **dare** to try and route a daily, two mile long Felixstowe-Lawley St down the GEML and up the WCML?) - I suspect the better utilisation even holds true with running a 5 day week, as the train can be unloaded, reloaded and be heading back again in as little as 3 to 4 hours, which just isn't possible with US train sizes...bottom line, a different place, a different 'right answer'.

[beast66606]

 

Felixstowe is proposing a 190m finger quay to enable it to handle two of the biggest container ships at once, if this is passed then the doubling of the line will start. It means the port can then handle 1.3m boxes per year = 3561 per day (including Sundays) - I wish it all went on the railway.

[trisonic]

 I had a look at the Felixstowe site and Sunday is just another day so far as ships arriving and departing, so do we assume that all weekend stuff is trucked away from there? It doesn't make too much sense to me at the moment....

 

Quite interesting NS document: http://www.nscorp.com/nscorphtml/bizns/bzns1212/BizNS_NovDec2012_WEB.pdf

 

Btw does anyone have links to BNSF, NS and CSX freight timetable sites?

 

Best, Pete.

[mcowgill]

There may be ships arriving and departing but there's not a lot of activity on the dockside on a Sunday, likewise there's very little road traffic to.from the docks on a Sunday.   

 

Martin

[Fat Controller]

I had a look at the Felixstowe site and Sunday is just another day so far as ships arriving and departing, so do we assume that all weekend stuff is trucked away from there? It doesn't make too much sense to me at the moment....

 

Best, Pete.

It'll be stacked on the quayside, or in the large stacking areas; little is 'just-in-time' which has to be delivered that urgently, otherwise the customers would have been pressing the shipping companies to abandon their 'slow-steaming' which has become general practice in container shipping ove rthe last few years. Given the capacity of the largest ships (which are too large for any port in the USA to handle, I have read in the trade press), incoming boxes have to be stacked anyway, as the number of containers they bring is too large, even with both road and rail, to be distributed in one day.

[Glorious NSE]

 I had a look at the Felixstowe site and Sunday is just another day so far as ships arriving and departing, so do we assume that all weekend stuff is trucked away from there? It doesn't make too much sense to me at the moment....

 

It's only a problem if the place receiving the container needs the contents ***right now*** - and plenty of loads are just not that time critical - if it's spent the best part of 3 weeks floating round the planet already then delivery one day later isn't the end of the world... Not to mention many other places of business also aren't open on Sundays, so there's fewer places to 'demand' a Sunday delivery.

 

Irrespective of mode of transport - lets say you're a large manufacturer of (for fun) UK outline model railway products and a container of your eagerly awaited new Fell loco's clear customs in Felixstowe on a Friday afternoon. Do you rush that box to your premises and pay your staff overtime to unload and add it to the warehouse inventory over the weekend - or do arrange for it to be delivered next week, when you're warehouse guy's at work anyhow, and get him and his sack truck to unload it as part of his normal 9-5? Do you *really* want the shipper to insist they must deliver it on the Sunday? Would it enable you to earn any extra income to offset the costs of bringing in folk on the weekend to unload it earlier?

 

Probably not.

 

Anything that *is* super-critical in terms of delivery time is likely on a truck anyway, as even on a weekday it's entirely possible to have a truck (depending on the timings) arriving at the customers loading dock in (for instance) Birmingham before the next scheduled Lawley St train has departed Felixstowe!

[definate maybe]

The port of Felixstowe does not open for collections without special dispensation (normally high explosives etc which they dont want siting on quay for longer than required) on Saturday after 14.00 or on a Sunday or on bank holidays although it is open for shipping 24/7 364 and treats 3 o clock on a Sunday morning (for example) the same as any other part of the week. When shipping lines are paying $30-45k a day to charter a vessel you want maximum productivity at all times!

Whilst inland distribution (ie warehouse to warehouse/ shops etc) is now very much a 7 day week, deliveries on a saturday afternoon or Sunday from containerised ports is still very rare and will attract surcharges of approx 150gbp per container (based on road haulage) and the majority of these will have been collected from the port on the friday or during saturday morning.

Going back 7 or 8 years then there was such a demand for container haulage that it seemed likely that it would also move towards a 7 day a week operation but with the way the world has changed in the last 5 years there doesnt seem to be the need for it.

container haulage via rail is normally working day 1 for day 3. Book delivery on day 1, railed on day 2 and delivered on day 3. In a country our size then it is easy to get everywhere within the 24 hour time span. Any weekend deliveries can easily to filled on a freightliner arriving on Friday with containers planned for Monday delivery and collected by the road vehicle before the terminal shuts for the weekend. Its not that unusual to see a freightliner with space these days so there is plenty of slack in the system for containers not to be railed on a sunday. The majority of warehouses also normally have available slots during the week. Whereas back in the boom it was a case of hunting warehouse/ haulage slots these days its a case of finding work for the readily available warehouses and vehicle/ trains.

[Satan's Goldfish]

All good stuff, thanks guys.

 

On the US side of it, i can remember watching the Fostoria cam when that was up a couple of years ago and being amazed at the length of the intermodal trains. The 750m trains they're planning out of the new Felixstow terminal really don't compare to sitting with the kids counting 140 double stacked wagons passing on the cam (roughly work that out as over 2km of train?!)

[Suzie]

Sundays do have the problem of engineering work, you cannot offload a container train on to a bus like most Sunday passengers are expected to do for part of their journey (easier with intermodal than with a coal hopper I know - but you get the drift). There is little in the way of alternative routes - if part of the route is closed you are stuck. The Royal Mail reason for abandoning rail is that all their trains run overnight - but all lines are disrupted overnight with engineering work - again no alternative routes requiring the 'Rail Replacement lorry' pretty much every night, Beeching 'rationalised' the alternative routes (Midland main line and Great Central London to Manchester for example) making the railway unworkable for time critical freight. I spoke to a parcel firm executive who said as much as he would like to use rail in to europe via the tunnel, he had enough traffic for a train, there was no way to get a guarantee that paths would always be available for time critical deliveries. Planes and lorries prevailed.

 

The only requirement for Sunday operations would be if all capacity Monday to Saturday was exhausted, then I think it would be a last resort. I recall reading that a coal train was run on Sundays because it was the only time the hoppers were not being used on other trains - so it might come to pass if there is a wagon shortage.

[trisonic]

I keep forgetting that "Freight" is the priority over here (compared to bums on seats) but not in the UK.

 

Someone said on another site (and I've lost the quote) that total freight tonnage per annum in North America is now equal to the total tonnage carried in the UK since Queen Victoria's funeral. I can't believe that, unless someone knows better....

 

I do know that NS alone carried 2.9 million containers in 2012, which is quite staggering.

 

Thanks for the interesting data everybody!

 

Best, Pete.

[Glorious NSE]

Someone said on another site (and I've lost the quote) that total freight tonnage per annum in North America is now equal to the total tonnage carried in the UK since Queen Victoria's funeral. I can't believe that, unless someone knows better....

 

Must admit the Queen Victoria's funeral quote sounds a little like hyperbole.

 

Logically, and with all things being equal (I know they aren't!) - the US is about 40 times bigger, so you'd expect a 40 times bigger figure just to be 'the same' - or the same thing in another way - one year would equate to our last 40 years of figures...

 

In actual fact looking at the Wikepedia figures here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_usage_statistics_by_country the US is about 117 times bigger (so maybe that Victoria quote is not so far out, although the UK's freight figures will have changed a lot over the years!) - but again lots is down to distance, which is down to size.

 

We have multiple FOCs fighting over traffic that the majority of US class 1s would be steadfastly avoiding - Felixstowe-Birmingham is just 165 miles - Southampton-Birmingham just 141 miles. The West Midlands market is probably the biggest and hardest fought one out there for rail intermodal, with at least 3 FOCs sending multiple trains per day to multiple terminals...Even Felixstowe-Glasgow (our longest 'deep sea' flow) is only 420 miles by truck (the train goes the long way round...)

 

For example - a quote from a US intermodal article cites "intermodal can be competitive at distances as short as 550 miles" - by US class 1 standards we shouldn't even be bothering...

[beast66606]

Sundays do have the problem of engineering work, you cannot offload a container train on to a bus like most Sunday passengers are expected to do for part of their journey (easier with intermodal than with a coal hopper I know - but you get the drift). There is little in the way of alternative routes - if part of the route is closed you are stuck. The Royal Mail reason for abandoning rail is that all their trains run overnight - but all lines are disrupted overnight with engineering work - again no alternative routes requiring the 'Rail Replacement lorry' pretty much every night, Beeching 'rationalised' the alternative routes (Midland main line and Great Central London to Manchester for example) making the railway unworkable for time critical freight. I spoke to a parcel firm executive who said as much as he would like to use rail in to europe via the tunnel, he had enough traffic for a train, there was no way to get a guarantee that paths would always be available for time critical deliveries. Planes and lorries prevailed.

 

The only requirement for Sunday operations would be if all capacity Monday to Saturday was exhausted, then I think it would be a last resort. I recall reading that a coal train was run on Sundays because it was the only time the hoppers were not being used on other trains - so it might come to pass if there is a wagon shortage.

 

Plenty of engineering work on Saturdays too - this weekend the cross country routedown here (Anglia)  is shut and freight is diverted via the ECML,which is a sizeable diversion, in a few weeks the opposite happens, the route to the ECML is shut and everything is diverted via the cross country route, it's possible to plan around these things.

 

There are also plenty of trains which do run on a Sunday, coal or iron ore mostly but some intermodal stuff can/does run

 

I don't think Royal Mail moved off the railway because of overnight engineering works.

[The Stationmaster]

I don't think Royal Mail moved off the railway because of overnight engineering works.

It played quite a big part in their decision - especially in view of the way Railtrack were pushing possession arrangements with very little consideration for overnight movements whereas BR had tried to plan possessions around, in particular, important mail and news trains.  But it wasn't just down to that, poor timekeeping was another factor as - allegedly - was cost.

 

But in reality Royal Mail (or whatever it calls itself this week or even back then) had been moving to road trunking since the early 1970s with much of the Parcel Post having gone over to road trunking in that decade.  The only thing which really prevented Letter Mail going to road was the 1928 Letter Mail contract which effectively tied it to rail for most routes until that contract was fully re-negotiated.

[Satan's Goldfish]

I've just put this on the Warren Lane thread, but likely to get answers here too:

 

Changing the subject, just been to do some 'research' beside the Oxford-Banbury line. First train on arrival was an FL 66 on containers. The wagons were all standard height 60ft flats and the boxes were all 40footers. However, there was a mix of mostly standard height and some high-cubes. I didn't think there was route clearance for high-cubes on standard wagons to Southampton? or has that changed recently?

 

 

Also, not looked at any actual figures, but if the US is 117 times bigger and their rail network is more aimed at freight than ours is then it's not inconceivable that they move the same each year as we have since Queen Victoria. it's hard to picture, but when thinking of the size and scope of US freight operations do they move the same amount in 1 day as we do in 100? From watching the Fostoria Camera when that was running i find it believable!

[trisonic]

Did you see that pdf I linked to in my post, above? Interesting bit on their new container transfer facility complete with reversing loop. Someone will model it.  See "The Rossville Loop".

 

Some great photos of double-stacks too.

 

Best, Pete.