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Class 43 Conversion to High-Speed Freight Haulage?

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edwin_m

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Is any of this possible? Freight, even parcels tends to be heavy, and top heavy too relative to a passenger carriage, so how fast can you take them round bends on the main lines safely?

The centre of gravity of a freight train may be a little bit higher, but the speed restrictions on curves are way way less than the speed at which the train might overturn. The defining factor is usually the comfort of passengers.
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But they are not full height. You need something you can wheel trolleys through if it being used for parcels.

This has been tried several times, including the prototype LFA (low flying aircraft) which was a Mk1 BG with giant ball bearing set into the floor so aircraft baggage container could be inserted through the doors then rolled into position.

More recently the 325 is a passenger multiple unit body with roller shutters instead of the sliding doors so cage trolleys of mail can be brought in and wheeled to stowage positions within the train. There will probably be plenty of redundant 31x units over the next decade or so if anybody wants to convert more of these.

In its early years Heathrow Express also had an area reserved for baggage, which could be checked in at Paddington and was then stored in enclosed trolleys in a locked compartment at the Heathrow end of each set.

The other option would be small containers, which uses less labour and I imagine loading from the side by forklift could be done under live OLE. There have been various schemes to do this over the years but none has been successful enough to be continued.
 
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AndrewE

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That said I'd say there is a huge market for shifting high value bulk loads of parcels on rail if they could get the right hardware and find paths on our already congested main lines.
If the network is congested (agreed) then parcels vans/BGs/DVTs/Motor Parcel Vans on existing services might be a good idea...(after all, some "trains" are only 2- to 5-cars through congested areas.) Maybe we should call it Red Star Parcels.
Or alternatively, why not cascade the HSTs to replace some of the short trains on passenger routes that are currently desperately overcrowded?
 

Class 66's

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The idea of reusing surplus HSTs for freight isn't new. I'm pretty certain that this idea has been thrown around before now.

Tractive effort aside, unless you are going to run fixed rakes of wagons that don't require splitting and shunting and are relatively lightly loaded, I can't really see what the benefit is going to be.

Now if you are talking parcels/mail, then it's probably worth a punt.
We've been here before, I'm sure. I got the impression the answer was, no, to be short. Long answer it would be over-expensive, for jobs uncertain/vanishing.
This isn't my opinion, just what I gathered from the last discussion on this.
 
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