Rail can't hope to beat road in most cases by cost, so you need something to set it aside.
You seem well informed and several contributors to this thread have made essentially the same comment.
However, I would like to see a serious analysis of
why intermodal freight over short distances cannot compete with road.
Objection 1: Freight trains are inherently too slow or infrequent to forward containers efficiently on short runs.
Response 1: This is not even slightly persuasive where potentially busy routes are concerned, as it is a chicken and egg problem. Speed and frequency of intermodal freight trains can be addressed with investments and subsidies to de-risk those investments to a degree (just like the investments that are made in roads and lorries).
Objection 2 : The time taken to shift boxes between vehicles makes total journey time too slow.
Response 2: See Response 1 - it depends on your equipment and facilities. See also the comments by others in this thread that a few extra hours is not necessarily critical in freight handling. Obviously there is an economic cost to financing stock that is in transit, but this cost is finite. This is why freight being held for consolidation before onward shipping is a fact of life.
Objection 3: Handling ISO boxes to transfer them from one vehicle to another is prohibitively expensive in
labour terms.
Response 3: Assuming one end of the journey involves transfer to/from a ship, there is one extra transfer between train and lorry at the distribution hub. In my book equal access to major container ports for either road or rail could and should be assumed (yes, it might mean an investment).
It would take 40 man hours to move 20 wagonloads of containers by lorry on a 2 hour run. If the same distance was covered, it would take 2 man hours to move 20 wagonloads by train. Unless loading between truck and train takes almost 2 man hours per container, or the administrative overheads are ludicrous for the train, you do save man hours by transhipping to the train.
A complicating factor here is waiting time. Would the lorry and driver have to wait for more or less time to be loaded at the freight hub compared to the wait at the dockside? You also have to cover the waiting time for the train and driver at the point of unloading or interchange between truck and train - which would depend on the facilities of course, so this is also a matter of investment.
The driver to operate a container crane could be recruited from the 19 lorry drivers who have been replaced by the train driver.
Rail wagons capable of automated unloading with side lift cranes are not inconceivable, and could empty an entire train in minutes though loading might be less automated, I imagine. See
http://news.nauticexpo.com/press/boxloader/new-boxloader-iceland-30677-204889.html
Could freight interchanges generate additional sources of income to support the costs of providing security and site supervision? For example, could they sell road fuel, food and other services to truck drivers?
Objection 4: Handling ISO boxes to transfer them from one vehicle to another is prohibitively expensive in
capital terms.
Response 4: But is it really, and if so why should this be so?
I have often seen the average total cost of transhipment as GBP 30 per box. Where does this figure come from and what does it include? Is this actually the cost per box of loading between trains and lorries on a wagonload basis, or is it a number that has been inferred from the cost of loading and unloading ships (which is a distinctly different process if you think about the steps involved and the equipment required).
Costs of land and hard standing: Trans shipping facilities require space with hard-standing obviously, but a container moving along a motorway at 60 mph requires an area of hard standing (known as a road) four to eight times its own length to accommodate it for the duration of its journey by road (if driven safely and depending on the length of the box). A container on a rail wagon requires rather less space in transit, lets say double the length of the container to be conservative (empty running is going to be an issue regardless of the mode being considered).
A container stacked in a goods yard requires no more than its own length assuming stacking just two-high is an option, for the duration of its wait. So, providing hard standing for containers in freight yards (if not transferred straight from train to lorry) appears to be, much cheaper than providing space on the road for those containers for the duration of an extended trunk run.
Costs of loading equipment: Cranes cost money, rail sidings and their associated signalling and points cost money to build, tis true. Is this where the real capital cost is? Just what is that cost?
Less busy interchanges really don't need the biggest, fanciest cranes, when quite small forklift-type vehicles on rubber wheels are perfectly capable of moving 40' containers.
Cost of vehicles I don't know the cost of a freight train vs the cost of road wagons. How does it compare? The amount of waiting time for vehicles in general ties up a hell of a lot of capital, and may well represent more value than the goods they are carrying, so speed of interchange and loading is vitally important as is the issue of transit time and queuing.
Objection: "if its so efficient, why hasn't it already happened?"...
Response: Maybe it really doesn't stack up in real terms... or maybe it is because the risk of investing in a lorry is really low and very granular compared with the big risk of investing in a train, let alone a railway line and a network of freight interchanges, so if government doesn't do it who will...? Lorries are a cheap and dirty solution whereas the barriers to entry for rail freight are so high because the initial investment required is so big.
A great many home owners are sitting on enough capital to become HGV owner operators overnight.. Now how many people do you know who can afford a freight train, or who could afford the training to drive it? And where would they run it, and how would they find the customers to fill it and how would they get it unloaded?
Railfreight requires major planning and investment whereas road freight can always muddle through even it is less efficient.
So we could give up and accept the suboptimal solution that the road haulage provides, or we could plan and invest our way towards something better, even if that does sound like communism to some
