Your statement in post no.
https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...-train-on-a-suburban-road.212569/post-4920892 read:
It's also interesting that in other countries you do still see rail used for transporting loads which in the UK are now pretty much exclusively moved by road, where rail wouldn't even be considered. So while the idea of moving a one off load from one point to another by rail might not be possible in the UK, it is still very much possible in comparable countries.
I suggest that this is the core of your argument. Can you give some examples of what you mean? From my observations of trains in some continental European countries - mainly Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany - freight trains look pretty similar to those here. Mineral wagons of various types, flat wagons with steel products, sometimes agricultural machinery but a lot of car transporters, some tank wagons and many, many containers and swap bodies. In the neighbourhood of the large ports - Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg - container traffic outweighs all the others.
In addition the market penetration of freight services varies considerably between countries - for example rail freight has less than 10% of the market in France, comparable to that in the UK but in a country with a much greater land mass which should benefit rail. Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have higher figures to which international transit traffic contributes strongly. Eurostat figures show that Denmark registered the highest share of transit traffic in 2019, with 85 %, followed by Switzerland (65 %), Slovakia (43 %), Austria (35 %) and Hungary (33 %). This latter traffic exists neither in the UK as it is an island nor in Norway for obvious reasons.
There is also a difference in manufacturing between the countries, the large scale industrial products made here have largely vanished. There is occasionally demand for oil and gas pipes for the North Sea but this traffic is essentially extinct. I’m finding it hard to visualise what special one-off traffic, and especially outsize items, could be rail hauled in the UK. Long bridge beams possibly - but unless they are needed on the railway a transfer to road vehicles for the last stretch would be obligatory anyway at additional cost and time.
You state in post no.
#78 :
That UK loading gauges and UK practices make this uncompetitive or unviable is a constraint from the UK rail industry, rather than a feature of rail networks in general.
I am not sure of the point you are trying to make here. The loading gauge issue is a result of being the first to develop railways; other countries took note and used larger gauges - sometimes without realising at the time what they were doing. For example railways built in the various German states were built cheaply - contempory books suggested about a third of the cost in England. In some cases this was achieved by edict that land was to be handed over and in others by avoiding tunnels and overbridges so, happily, reducing the number of instances of height constraints. They never had high platforms which were a user friendly way of boarding trains rather than the clamber up from rail level in other places.
Your phrasing implies that the size of the loading gauge is an intentional, possibly malevolent, constraint by ‘the industry’ so making it not easily or economically possible to move large one-off loads. I suggest that you have created a straw man for purely rhetorical purposes. Think for a moment about the costs involved in opening up the loading gauge over even a few routes to the smallest UIC loading gauge - and contrast those costs with the income that might be generated by the occasional one-off move of a large item. You would rightly be shouting from the housetops about the waste of tax-payers money - as it would be the tax-payer who pays for the enlargement.