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Passengers and Railfreight - how to prioritise
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The Planner
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Fenny and Dorridge should be already done. Banbury was improved as part of the re-signalling. Oxford should be better too now. Kingsbury is down to cost cutting on Water Orton re-signalling. There is a designed solution for that which has fallen on to the Midlands Connect thing.Are you saying there is more work that needs to be done (but isn't currently planned), or work is being done (or has been done)?
Agreed - it caused more than a 10 minute delay to me when a train I recently took, was held just before Kingsbury Branch Junction, because it had been deemed a good idea to let out a class 6 freight in front of us, and to then let it shunt back into Kingsbury. All at 5mph, blocking the main line.
ForTheLoveOf
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Don't even get me started on the insanity that is the bidirectional platform at Water Orton... I can't imagine it was always that way, surely!
At Colchester on the Down, we have two Goods Rds, however, if we have a freight running towards Ipswich, with an Inter City say 3 mins on it's tail at Marks Tey, we will try and keep the freight on greens, (unless we are told otherwise) and keep it going to Ipswich, by the time the Inter City has called at Colchester and Manningtree, the freight will be clearing into the yard at Ipswich when the IC service is still on greens approaching Halifax Junction, if we put it on the GL at Colchester, have no doubt it would tickle the IC for a minute or so, but that would then get greens after that, BUT we then have to find an alternate path for the freight from a standing start, at 2000 feet long and maybe 1800 tonnes, making the freight late or later, and maybe hitting a passenger service following.
You don’t need a freight EMU. You just need more power.
They don’t run freight more efficiently. If anything. It is less efficient.
Also, and this is not generally understood by most, but in comparison to the GB network, most of Europe’s regional and long distance railway sees relatively little use. Freight can fit in easily. The exceptions are in some parts of Germany (Rhine Valley for example - the freight tend to be segregated to one side) and the routes to Rotterdam, for which the Betuweroute was specifically built for freight.
Agreed - the extra power and tractive effort available from electric makes a big difference but on some bits of the GEML the limitation is the substation capacity, 2x 86 take rather a lot...
coppercapped
Established Member
It's difficult to give a concise answer to your question about the co-existence of freight and passenger services in other countries as it often depends where one is in these countries. The two countries I know most about are Germany and France as I have lived in both so I'll confine my comments to these two. Both countries differ from each other in the political and financial structures of their railways and both are different to the UK - this can be seen in the levels of subsidy. Somewhere in the World Wide Web I found a table showing the subsidy per passenger journey for a selection of European railways which showed both the French and German railways being similar at about €10 or €11 and the UK at about one third of this. This is not meant as a criticism or endorsement - it is as it is.
In France there has been a political tendency over the years to show that the French way of running railways is better than those of its neighbours so the Government was prepared to spend a lot of money showing this to be true, for example by building the high speed routes, mostly centred on Paris. This means that many of the long distance passenger flows are now on the Lignes Grand Vitesse leaving capacity on the older routes for freight, but in France, in spite of the long distances, freight traffic only amounts to some 30 billion tonne-km. For comparison freight traffic in the UK is about 17 billion tonne-km in a smaller country, but this is after the loss of practically all the coal traffic over the past five years. Both countries pale in contrast to Germany at around 130 billion tonne-km. By no means all of the freight traffic in Germany is internally generated, it has borders with nine other countries so transit traffic, especially to and from the North Sea ports from Antwerpen round to Bremerhaven, is very significant.
Germany is polycentric and passenger and freight flows are a lot more diverse than the UK or France. One of the major north-south axes follows the Rhine Valley and there is a (basically twin track) railway on both banks from Köln southwards to Mainz. Passenger traffic tends to use the left bank and freight the right although much of the long distance passenger traffic has now shifted to the new(ish) high speed route running direct from Köln to Frankfurt-am-Main - so in effect the different flows are now separated. The same is largely true for the more easterly north-south routes (Hamburg, Hannover, Nürnberg, München) to Austria and Italy through the more easterly Alpine passes. Freight avoiding lines are still available around many of the main centres such as Berlin, Köln, München, Frankfurt and the plethora of routes through the industrial heartlands of the Ruhr valley. Flying and burrowing junctions are commonplace.
However in both countries the frequency of passenger services tends to be a lot lower than is the case here - hourly, two hourly, a few times a day are not uncommon. In Germany frequent services around the large cities are classified as S-Bahn and more and more are getting their own dedicated facilities. These tend to run on a 20 minutes cycle and at peak times the services are increased by running at 10 minute or 5 minute intervals. For example the S-Bahn in München (where I used to live) ran 30 trains an hour through the central tunnels in the peak.
So, to (partially) answer your question - the issue of mixing passenger and freight traffic in France is not really a problem due to the comparatively low traffic densities of both passenger and freight on the 'classic' lines outside Paris and the surrounding Île de France and in Germany there is a more infrastructure to cope with the traffic mix: much long distance passenger traffic runs on new(ish) high speed routes leaving more capacity on the 'classic' routes and passenger train frequencies on the regional networks are generally not so high as here.
Substation / distribution capacity is the issue everywhere. To put enough power on a freight train to give it Class 700 performance you need 20MW; at that sort of power draw there would be various bits of the catenary under severe thermal stress, let alone the substation. And if there were two on each line passing each other....
HSTEd
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Then perhaps freight trains should not be offered paths over infrastructure improved at enormous expense, when such paths can generate far more revenue carrying passengers
When the operators pay full commercial rates for the infrastructure they use, I will care far more about their "operational flexibility".
If freight trains werent running around with obsolete braking systems the braking distance would not be substantially more than passenger trains. ECP or full blown electropneumatic given that this is a multiple unit we are talking about.
And the power sources can be huge thanks to the magic of 25kV - which is the power source most used in freight operations is it not?
20MW is not beyond what is regularly achieved on other infrastructure however.
A double TGV 'Dayse' set gets rather close to 20MW.
And yet freight operators aren't interested in high power locomotives, and simply order puny Bo-Bo mixed traffic locomotives when there is no mixed traffica ny longer.
It doesn't matter if you care or I care or if Joe Bloggs down the street cares. If the FOCs are not interested as it doesn't benefit them and/or costs them a huge amount of money for not much return then your idea will not even get off the fag packet stage.
Conventional air braking system is not obsolete. Its very simple and very effective.
The magic of 25kV? The same system that often has a severe reduction in available traction current when more than a few services are in the same section? You are asking the OLE to power a multiple 2000 tonne trains at the same rates passenger trains...where on earth is that currently done?
You clearly have an axe to grind against freight and are clearly living in your own little world.
DarloRich
Veteran Member
Firstly posters here need to accept the freight train might be more important tham the passenger train!
Indeed it does, but then the power system is designed for that, and the trains are usually running 25km apart; there will rarely be more between a substation and the end of the electrical section, and even more rarely at full power. Rather different to the GEML, for example.
In any event the point is you don’t need an EMU to achieve better acceleration, just higher power locos. But neither are likely.
HSTEd
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Then their hugely subsidised paths should be withdrawn.
Every "conventional" freight train eats capacity for negligible societal and economic benefit.
Fifty lorries off a motorway is not that good a deal compared to potentially hundreds of cars off town and city streets.
It's simple, but it's not effective.
It takes substantial time to properly apply the brakes, the brakes cannot be easily released and reapplied, or easily reapplied and any number of other problems.
Its a technology of the 19th Century and should be left there.
ECP iron ore trains massing many thousands of tonnes in the US are capable of stopping in less than their own length.
The electrification system doesn't really care what mass the train is.
It cares what the power demand is - and a 20MW high speed train is not that different to a 20MW heavy freight train.
And we have freight locomotives in the ten megawatt range in Europe and in China. See the iORE.
The HXD3B manages nearly ten megawatts on a CoCo chassis.
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tbtc
Veteran Member
Interesting, cheers.
In which case, if a freight path through a bottleneck at 11:03 blocks out all fo the daytime xx:03 paths then that seems a waste, given the opportunity cost being a passenger service that use the paths on an hourly basis.
So, regular freight is great but a tiny amount of freight a day can create a big gap in the passenger timetable.
Shaw S Hunter
Established Member
Further to @coppercapped's post I would suggest that making a comparison with France or Germany may not be very helpful. At first glance it may appear that we are geographically of similar size to them but in terms of where we still have a genuine network our population density is much closer to that of Belgium or the Netherlands. As such the latter two would make for a much better comparison. I do not claim any expertise regarding freight operations in B or NL but my impression from visits there is that aside from the Betuwe route serving Rotterdam/Europort most freights are relatively short distance, infrequent and declining in number as traditional coal and steel flows dry up. However both countries have invested in increased grade separation at key nodes to the benefit of all traffic; yes it is a hobby horse of mine but we would surely get better use of our network with a few more flyover junctions thus expediting flows and decreasing the likelihood of freight and passenger trains causing each other operational conflicts.
matacaster
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How much of a problem is that whilst passenger paths are scheduled and almost always used, freight paths are often allocated but then not used. This can be because of 'tidal flows' such as wanting a path to be available when a ship arrives at port, but its arrival time might be wildly different to that predicted. Eg drax Liverpool.
Just in time manufacturers make very late decisions and expect a delivery asap. For parcels, shortened hat's might be a good idea?
Just in time manufacturers make very late decisions and expect a delivery asap. For parcels, shortened hat's might be a good idea?
ac6000cw
Established Member
At UK train lengths, standard air braking is OK.
As has been mentioned before in this forum, in the UK freight vehicles are fitted with 'distributors', which allow partial releases, instead of traditional triple-valves, which don't. See https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/air-brakes-on-loco-hauled-services.129972/#post-2549221 and http://www.railway-technical.com/trains/rolling-stock-index-l/train-equipment/brakes/
Also, even with triple-valves, the vehicle reservoir capacity and brake line pressure are designed to allow for several sets-and-releases - it's just that you can't do lots without allowing the system to fully recharge, but that's only a real problem on long, steep, variable downhill gradients (when combined with poor planning of the braking strategy before starting the descent).
It's Australian (not US) mining operations that use ECP braking on huge iron ore trains.
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I doubt many will agree, but my views are...
Railfreight covers such a broad spectrum of trains that it's hard to generalise. A 1100T class 4 behaves so much differently to a 3000T class 7.
In general though, it's better overall in my opinion to keep a freight rolling than looping it. It can be frustrating to be delayed for a late running class 1, becoming say 5 late, to then spend 20 minutes and many miles to finally get up to 75mph only to then be immediately brought to a stand to be regulated behind a class 2, perhaps waiting 10 minutes for said train to arrive at the station you're waiting at and then trundle off in front of you. The freight then becomes very late and then subject to further regulation almost everywhere. If it had been kept running those delays and further knock on delays never would have happened. I've experienced this on a just-under three hour trip, when an initial small delay due to a late passenger train has made my freight over an hour late at the end, all because of regulation. That doesn't help freight on rail to be competitive.
While increasing entry and exit speeds to loops is moderately helpful it doesn't help that much. At Fenny Compton you're braver that me to keep at 40 into the loop and do a Hail Mary stop downhill before the red. Coming out of the loop at up to 40 helps, yes, but the entry is only slightly better at "40" for me.
For me, freight at-speed should be given some priority at junctions, even if this puts a few minutes of delay into a passenger train. The freight given early clearance through the junction will clear it so much quicker than if it's given two yellows, one yellow and then a red that steps up to green. That minimises overall delay. But this is not the system we have at the moment. Restrictive signalling slows the freight, blocks the junction longer, burns shed loads of CO2 extra and eats precious capacity.
Railfreight covers such a broad spectrum of trains that it's hard to generalise. A 1100T class 4 behaves so much differently to a 3000T class 7.
In general though, it's better overall in my opinion to keep a freight rolling than looping it. It can be frustrating to be delayed for a late running class 1, becoming say 5 late, to then spend 20 minutes and many miles to finally get up to 75mph only to then be immediately brought to a stand to be regulated behind a class 2, perhaps waiting 10 minutes for said train to arrive at the station you're waiting at and then trundle off in front of you. The freight then becomes very late and then subject to further regulation almost everywhere. If it had been kept running those delays and further knock on delays never would have happened. I've experienced this on a just-under three hour trip, when an initial small delay due to a late passenger train has made my freight over an hour late at the end, all because of regulation. That doesn't help freight on rail to be competitive.
While increasing entry and exit speeds to loops is moderately helpful it doesn't help that much. At Fenny Compton you're braver that me to keep at 40 into the loop and do a Hail Mary stop downhill before the red. Coming out of the loop at up to 40 helps, yes, but the entry is only slightly better at "40" for me.
For me, freight at-speed should be given some priority at junctions, even if this puts a few minutes of delay into a passenger train. The freight given early clearance through the junction will clear it so much quicker than if it's given two yellows, one yellow and then a red that steps up to green. That minimises overall delay. But this is not the system we have at the moment. Restrictive signalling slows the freight, blocks the junction longer, burns shed loads of CO2 extra and eats precious capacity.
HSTEd
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Yes, but UK train lengths are far from optimal for freight operations.
Even so, at 75mph by the time the pressure drop reaches the end of an 800m freight train, several seconds will have passed which is potentially ~130m without full braking effort being applied.
We might be better off doubling the length of freight trains and accepting that most existing loops are not useful, because we would be able to run the same freight with many fewer paths.
It's worth noting that ECP brakes have various other advantages.
For example freight trains can easily be made push-pull, since distributed power control can very easily be added to the traffic over the provided cabling....
That alone would save substantial shunting operations because you can the double headed locomotives common today at the ends and run them like a HST.
Also relying on human factors to prevent exhaustion of braking air capacity is kind of asking for trouble.
An ECP system completely eliminates the exhaustion of air-reservoir failure mode, at least I understand it.
The East coast ports of Tyne Dock, Hull and Immingham all have biomass handling facilities.
Most of Drax’s biomass comes from Baton Rouge on the Gulf coast of the US, it’s probably cost effective due to the ships having a shorter journey to Liverpool, also the port handling charges for Liverpool may be less than the east coast ports.
HSTEd
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The cost of cargo ships sailing around to an East Coast port is going to be much smaller than the cost of shipping it overland.
I expect it is the relatively low railfreight rate and the lower handling costs, they can play ports against one another more effectively this way - most ports in the area of Drax are run by the same operator - ABP.
With such a low value commodity as biomass it is unlikely to take much to shift the balance in favour of shipping it to a port closer to Drax.
theironroad
Established Member
Logistics managers in freight forwarder companies don't care about whether commuter A gets to work on time or Leisure passenger B makes the start of the cricket at 1100, they care about whether their consignment of products made in china which have made it from China to the UK on time can get to their inland destination depot on time for forward distribution.
That's the reality.
If rail is going to get and maintain freight business , it has to be run on time,to what the contract has determined otherwise rail will lose the contract back to road (less likely to air) .
Obviously there are times when lines are blocked to all traffic, but when open a balance has to be made between passenger, postal and freight...
That's the reality.
If rail is going to get and maintain freight business , it has to be run on time,to what the contract has determined otherwise rail will lose the contract back to road (less likely to air) .
Obviously there are times when lines are blocked to all traffic, but when open a balance has to be made between passenger, postal and freight...
They do. Or at least, they come far closer to it than passengers do. Rail freight in the UK is operated on a purely commercial basis without subsidy, unlike most passenger operations.
Maybe we should say that since passengers don't pay full commercial rates to use the railway they should wait for their one railbus a day and be happy about it?
That's an easy trick to pull off when the train is long enough. With braking on every vehicle the stopping distance doesn't change much whether the train has six wagons or 682. Would there be advantages to more power and better braking? Probably, but also increased cost.
HSTEd
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The rail freight industry in no way operates anywhere close to commercial rates.
Even leaving aside modal shift grants and other direct support, as well as subsidies in terms of relief from fuel taxation, they benefit from collossal indirect subsidies given to Network Rail - largely as a political calculation to try and eliminate subsidy payments direct to franchises.
We justify passenger subsidies on social grounds.
What social grounds do you have for crippling passenger operations that benefits tens of thousands of people to allow a few hundred lorries to be kept off motorways designed to allow lorries to easily move across the country?
Especially when they stubbornly refuse to modernise in any way and just scream for ever more public money to be thrown after them in infrastructure improvements and artificially low track access costs?
It does with conventional air brakes given that the signal to apply the brake takes a substantial time to travel down a long train.
The stubborn refusal of the railfreight industry to modernise costs society far more than it would cost to modernise.
Low length, low weight, low value freight trains consume valuable paths and vast quantities of pollution are spewed into the sky by obsolete diesel engines.
Which exist precisely because of the social costs of road freight. The grants are made to the company whose goods are being transported, rather than the railway company moving them. Whilst that's still a subsidy, the relationship between the rail freight operator and Network Rail is a commercial one, and the commercial rate is paid.
A very similar scheme exists for waterborne freight; do you believe that cargo shipping should have to surrender its' harbour berths to allow ferries and cruise ships to use them?
An absence of punishment does not constitute a reward - fuel for rail use is, as far as I'm aware, taxed exactly the same as the same fuel when used in any other non-road use.
So in other words, Network Rail is paid to provide a rail network for freight and passenger operators alike. If the freight operators went away entirely, Network Rail would still have to maintain it for passenger operations. Either you have it, or you don't. The incremental cost due to any particular train is covered by the track access charges.
And yet you want to put that freight on to the roads, where its' transport will be less energy efficient and therefore the pollution still more vast. You want to remove the possibility of electrifying that freight, locking in that vast quantity of pollution. This in order to remove a minor inconvenience to a handful of passenger trains.
I agree that the efficiency of freight operation could be greatly improved. Even within the constraints of a mixed-traffic railway. But that's no reason to kick it off the network. Keep it moving, and it's faster than a stopping passenger service - it's the expresses that cause problems, and the stoppers get in their way as well.
HSTEd
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It's a commercial one, but the entire rail industry is inherently non commercial as it receives huge blanket subsidies.
If those berths only existed because of ongoing taxpayer spending, then it is important that the taxpayer get maximum benefit from the money expended.
It is paid to maintain a rail network in the public interest.
I do not believe continued accommodation of freight operations in the present form is in the public interest
If there were no rail freight operations the railway would look rather different and would likely cost substantially less in improvements and maintenance.
We would not have to spend huge amounts of money building and operating freight loops, various flyovers and improvements such as the one north of Peterborough are only necessary because of freight operations, numerous railways receive substandard passenger services because of the interference of freight operations.
All these things constitute subsidies to freight operators at the expense of passenger operations.
Actually as I have demonstrated before, road freight operations produce substantially less non-CO2 pollution than rail freight operations.
Almost all rail freight operations are conducted using obsolete diesels of which the Class 66 is the most "modern", and those things spit out NOx and particulates in a way that will never be accepted from road hauliers.
Except this freight will never be electrified.
As has been repeatedly demonstrated, rail freight operators have little interest in electrifying additional operations.
They have no incentive to do so since they know that the politicians will never permit the collapse of the railfreight industry, so they can just avoid innovation and know they will always be able to demand additional subsidies to make up for the extra costs of just carrying on as they are now.
We will likely get eHighways on motorways long before we get a significant additional fraction of freight operations electrified.
How many freight operations that were not electric at privatisation are electric now?
A handful?
Freight trains going through the Castlefield corridor alone constitute a huge problem for hundreds of passenger trains are a contributing factor to the inability to actually make the timetable work.
Freight trains are the reason there is essentially no passenger service on the Felixstowe Branch, or the reason that we have to spend £200m on a diveunder at Werrington. £200m that could have been spent on a passenger scheme someplace else with much better public outcomes
Average speed is not the only problem, the acceleration curve differences means that you have to keep the trains far enough apart that they don't drop out of their slot whilst accelerating and slowing down.
The most efficient railway is made up of identical unit trains, average speed is only one factor - an important one but far from the only one.
If we keep freight on the network it will never change.
It has no reason to.
Hell, even when they order electrics they decide to order lightweight underpowered mixed traffic locomotives that look like something from the 80s or before. (Class 88)
There is no reason to ever order a Bo-Bo locomotive again in the UK.
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A fact which, as has been pointed out to you before, is entirely due to the fact that the average age of freight locomotives is higher than for road traction. Rail will always have lower energy consumption. For equivalent engine technology, lower energy consumption means less pollution.
The issue isn't dirty trains, but old trains. And that's addressed by providing incentives (carrot and stick) to use new locomotives. Including electrification, which as well as being cleaner also allows for higher performance. Even modern diesels would give much lower pollution than road haulage.
I don't believe we'll ever see any appreciable amount of electrified roadways. For local links, perhaps, but they remove the flexibility (even with 'last-mile' batteries) that makes long haul road transport work. In fact, electrification of roads basically makes lorries into badly designed trains.
Agreed. But you're not going to get identical unit trains, unless you want every Anglo-Scottish service to be an all-stations stopper worked by a suburban EMU. Or inner suburban services to be worked by Class 800s.
Keep the freight moving, and accelerate the passenger service with higher performance multiple units so that the freight doesn't catch it up. Don't blame the freight in this case; it's the victim here. And avoiding having to slow freight down for passengers will also improve the economic and environmental credentials of rail freight!
If it comes to a crunch between a passenger railway or a freight railway, then lose the passengers. Buses are better at moving people than HGVs are at moving freight. In some cases, buses are a better option than trains for moving people - unlike trains, they're quite good at stopping and starting. If you're moving a trainload of containers several hundred miles, rail is far more efficient than road.
HSTEd
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But we aren't going to get new trains.
There is no appetite for ordering new diesel locomotives and will not be any time soon.
The railway also goes out of it's way to subvert environmental restrictions, there was no reason to build Class 66s in 2014 except to avoid having to comply with regs.
There should be no talk of returning old stored diesels to service, they should all be scrapped.
The eHighway proposals would use bi-mode lorries.
Considering a very large fraction of lorry mileage (something like half) occurs on a very small fraction of roads - the STrategic Road Network, very large gains in electric road freight traction can be gained very quickly with little electrification work.
And given the short operating lives of lorries, the embedded capital is far smaller.
They would be "badly designed trains" that can travel on roads.
So not really trains at all.
The Class 395 demonstrates that modern technology has largely erased the distinction, it has performance worthy of a suburban unit and yet is capable of operating at speeds that are above those of traditional British intercity services.
Very fast accelerating trains reduce the spacing necessary between trains before acceleration becomes irrelevant, at which point the trains will all be travelling at the same speed.
Using the Class 395 as an example, a 60 second stop at a station on a 100mph railway will cost the train something like 90 seconds compared to running non-stop.
It really has changed everything.
We are not in the world of slovenly Sprinters now.
But unless you plan to force people onto buses at gunpoint..... yeah.
You won't replace trains with buses, you replace them with cars.
Buses have essentially no advantages over cars for the passenger except perhaps cost - and often not even then if the person already has a car for some other reason.
And modern trains are actually really good at stopping and starting, see the S-Stock, the Class 395 or even the Class 230.
Unfortunately their are precious few routes where containers would be moving several hundred miles in the UK.
300 miles from London in the Northerly direction gets you north of Newcastle, which means you are already beyond something like 90% of the UK population.
In the Westerly direction it gets you pretty close to Sennen Cove.
The only way railfreight has a chance on UK distances is things like rolling highways, which we can't do due to our loading gauge.
Greybeard33
Established Member
Except that, politically, car users have more votes than rail passengers. And the complaints I hear most often from motorists are about lorries clogging up the motorways. And about roadworks delays to repair the damage caused by heavy lorries. Not about a lack of passenger trains that they themselves could use instead of driving.
"Get the freight off the roads on to the railways!" they cry.
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