Could / should more supermarket distribution centres have railheads ?

[yoyothehobo]

I have started buying eggs in a wood on a footpath by a gate where they are left in a clear plastic box!

Pick up a carton, leave the money inside.

This will be quoted shortly to prove I want the whole of Britain doing this by Wednesday this week!!

Nobody wants to return to the past (well maybe except Nigel Farridge )

What is happening in this thread is that several posters are justifiably questioning the current distribution systems which aren’t sustainable long term.

That is a reasonable argument.

Maybe so, but are they suggesting it because they have a reasonable argument or they just like trains to do everything...

 

[JohnR]

To answer the OP.

Yes, they should.

But - I'm not sure its possible to do much more economically now. If supermarkets had planned their locations better in the past, they could have had rail links direct to the door - likewise with the distribution networks. We're probably 25 years too late. If it had been suitably structured at that time (and with "competing" supermarkets sharing trains etc. we could have seen a much more comprehensively distribution of stock by rail.

 

[furnessvale]

it all depends what offers the most profit - personally I prefer the large central hub concept ( or more accurately a number of large hubs ) that can service the downstream distribution network.

Fully agree and the larger the hub the larger the hinterland it needs to justify it. Hence the ability of rail to be competitive from large hubs like DIRFT.

 

[DarloRich]

What is happening in this thread is that several posters are justifiably questioning the current distribution systems which aren’t sustainable long term.

they might not be - but diesel trucks are going to be replaced by hybrid or electric vehicles. Many of these vehicles will be driver less. The bottom end of the chain is still going to be road based. None of that offers an opportunity for railways. We cant get away from that.

Once again - railways work well moving large scale bulk level consignments long distances at decent speed. In an alternative universe we could have van load type services but the infrastructure does not support that traffic ( and is unlikely to do again) nor does the network have the spare capacity to facilitate such trains. That is before we consider the costs involved in van load services.

 

[Dai Corner]

Even the quite large number of supermarkets built on old goods yards or other surplus railway land where a rail connection would have been trivial to provide don't have one.

 

[Dr Hoo]

Even the quite large number of supermarkets built on old goods yards or other surplus railway land where a rail connection would have been trivial to provide don't have one.

Yes, but a single supermarket doesn't come anywhere near needing a trainload of goods per day.

Even a really large distribution centre, say 1,000,000 square feet, doesn't usually generate either a complete trainload of stock in or a complete trainload of goods for delivery out from/to another single point. Even Daventry only 'works' on the basis of shared trains. E.g. Only this morning on a trip to Scotland I noted Tesco and Asda boxes along with 'generic' logistics company boxes and deep-sea containers on passing intermodal services.

 

[yoyothehobo]

Is that any better really? I try to buy local meat and veg where possible but its all been on the r

Even the quite large number of supermarkets built on old goods yards or other surplus railway land where a rail connection would have been trivial to provide don't have one.

Why would you give a supermarket a rail connection? For at most 3 HGV loads a day? That would logstically be a nightmare, be expensive and unreliable

 

[Dai Corner]

Yes, but a single supermarket doesn't come anywhere near needing a trainload of goods per day.

Even a really large distribution centre, say 1,000,000 square feet, doesn't usually generate either a complete trainload of stock in or a complete trainload of goods for delivery out from/to another single point. Even Daventry only 'works' on the basis of shared trains. E.g. Only this morning on a trip to Scotland I noted Tesco and Asda boxes along with 'generic' logistics company boxes and deep-sea containers on passing intermodal services.

Why would you give a supermarket a rail connection? For at most 3 HGV loads a day? That would logstically be a nightmare, be expensive and unreliable

That's what it appears some people would like to see happen

 

[yoyothehobo]

That's what it appears some people would like to see happen

Ah, i misread, reading it again I can see that you appear to be saying that when they could have them they dont have one, showing how futile this is, rather than suggesting they should have them.

 

[Dai Corner]

Are, i misread, reading it again I can see that you appear to be saying that when they could have them they dont have one, showing how futile this is, rather than suggesting they should have them.

That's right. I see now that I could have worded it better!

 

[squizzler]

This thread has not whether our rail connection could be light rail. If the distribution centre is on the outskirts of a conurbation blessed with an established light rail system there might be the opportunity to dispatch your goods to the stores within the conurbation by converted (likely cascaded from frontline passenger use) tram.

In several European cities the light rail network is being used for the transportation of various goods through the city. The latest experiments have been carried out in the city of Saint-Étienne over the past two months. For cities with an existing infrastructure, freight transport per tram is an appealing alternative transport mode.

I imagine the setup is the opposite of classic intermodal: the traditional lorry supply chain does the trunk haul and the rail mode doing the local distribution. If the site already had a rail siding it might be on the wrong side of the building! On the other hand, installing a light rail connection would be a lot easier than heavy rail because you can run on the existing roads within the trading estate.

Various city fathers have proposals to ban or penalise internal combustion engines. The tram network may be one of the choices open to freight forwarders allowing business to continue as usual.

Looking now at under-utilised rural lines, a firm called 42 Technology has come up with a means of folding up the seats like what we do with our cars when taking a large package back from Ikea. I used to live on the Heart of Wales Line and an empty train would come down the line from Crewe to Llandrindod at silly o'clock in the morning (it arrived into Llandrindod at 0618!). If only it could do something useful with all that fuel being consumed such as take a few cages of milk bread and newspapers to communities en route!

 

[PeterC]

I used to live on the Heart of Wales Line and an empty train would come down the line from Crewe to Llandrindod at silly o'clock in the morning (it arrived into Llandrindod at 0618!). If only it could do something useful with all that fuel being consumed such as take a few cages of milk bread and newspapers to communities en route!

Once upon a time the papers from Fleet Street would have been unloaded at Crewe and put on the train. In some cases the Crossville bus would have carried them on the final leg to the villages. (I once travelled overnight from Euston to Trawsfynydd on three trains and a bus with the newspapers all the way to the village shop).

So move newspaper printing back to central London, undo privatisation and sectorisation on the railways and then you might have a chance. We are where we are now after a lot of structural changes that make it difficult to use rail for small loads.

As I said earlier if we still had the sidings and other infrastructure that was build over during the last 50 years and factories and warehouses still in their traditional railside locations then you could build something that would work using the advances in scheduling, materials handling and signalling technologies that have come along since. Fine for a "future history" novel but not for real life.

 

[squizzler]

Once upon a time the papers from Fleet Street would have been unloaded at Crewe and put on the train. In some cases the Crossville bus would have carried them on the final leg to the villages. (I once travelled overnight from Euston to Trawsfynydd on three trains and a bus with the newspapers all the way to the village shop).

So move newspaper printing back to central London, undo privatisation and sectorisation on the railways and then you might have a chance. We are where we are now after a lot of structural changes that make it difficult to use rail for small loads.

I wouldn't waste too much energy figuring how to get newspapers back onto rail. As any fule kno, the printed newspaper business is in terminal decline.

As I said earlier if we still had the sidings and other infrastructure that was build over during the last 50 years and factories and warehouses still in their traditional railside locations then you could build something that would work using the advances in scheduling, materials handling and signalling technologies that have come along since. Fine for a "future history" novel but not for real life.

Not as a one size fits all system across the nation, no it won't. I was trying to highlight a couple of innovative new solutions. And we are hardly trying to turn the clock back. Light rail, in its modern form, is really only as old as High Speed Rail. We probably don't know yet know all the applications where it might find a niche. And as for all those lost sidings and spurs, we are having to build light rail networks from scratch anyway.

The negative impacts of traffic on people is of course much greater in cities than out on the motorways. Cities also have more scope to manage the types of vehicles in their centres. A light rail connection to a distribution centre (possibly a common carrier handling all peoples goods bound for the centre) seems to make a lot of sense.

As for local distribution on the Heart of Wales line, yes, I must declare something of a personal interest. Nonetheless the "adaptable carriage" would open up new opportunities and enable the same train to be earning money throughout the day and night. Somebody thinks there might be a niche for this system and has put a lot of care into the design. I only hope the concept finds an adopter!

 

[FlippyFF]

Kill two chickens in one go and have KFC do on-train catering?

 

[corfield]

I read this thread from start to finish and I cannot find anybody here saying that either. Could you quote from the specific posts?

This. Describing a time when rail was the only mechanical land transport demonstrates that it is technically feasible to replace an exclusively lorry based distribution system with an exclusively rail based one, not that it is desirable to do so. Hence the share of goods on road or rail is a political decision not an inevitability determined by the laws of nature as defenders of the status quo would have us believe. Of course the opposite of a bad idea is usually another bad idea and, whilst I feel using lorries as the "one size fits all" option is sub optimal, the same goes for using nothing but rail. After all, when we start dealing with loads that fit on a 0-6-0 shunter dragging one box van you will basically just have recreated a lorry but on rails. The optimal solution will no doubt lie somewhere in the middle.

I still maintain that, whilst as a society we are very good at shipping things halfway round the world, yet this is not a desirable situation on many levels. I think a proper reconfiguration of our supply chains needs to have the scope to look at whether much of the movement of goods is socially and economically necessary, and how it might be discouraged. Of course having said that it will be claimed by some of the more zealous contributors that I advocate we all give up any manufactured goods and live in autarkic villages.

So, not sure what the strawmen/selection thing is about - your comments are pretty clear, and there for all to see. I'm hardly the only one to take the exact same implication and meaning. If it makes you feel better, I've quoted your entire post.

Looking at above - again, devoid of actual facts. The fact that 11000+ miles of railways built pretty much everywhere sensibly possible (and many places that weren't really sensible!) utilising vast amounts of infrastructure, town/city centre land take, equipment and manpower were able to deliver a small range of products relatively short distances to a small consumer base does not in any way suggest it is possible for that type of system to replace a lorry (& import sea) based one which delivers a vastly larger array of goods to more places for substantially (twice, thrice?) the population over vast (global) distances. I mean no one ever has built a railway network as dense as we did. Yet it didn't work economically. Our road and lorry based system has worked economically to vast benefit as we can see in exploding consumption (as it becomes possible to make and distribute new items) and economic activity in an array of locations an order of magnitude greater (every single village now gets multiple supply routes - many many places were still always missed off the railway network even at its height). Desirability doesn't come into it - the obvious facts on the ground are that lorry has achieved much more in the UK than rail ever did in terms of wagonload style logistics. that's why we have lorry based logistics and why we don't have wagonload freight. I would suggest it is very clear that it isn't technically feasible to replace lorry with rail - the complexity of sources to end-user in the right quantities at the right time would be beyond any rail system even if cost was ignored, which even in that phrase of "technically possible" still has to consider usage of resources (land take for example).

The very fact that the rail system (in this case, wagonload freight) failed to be viable even then makes a mockery that it could compete now. Hence why it doesn't, and hence why it died a death as lorry and road technology evolved. Your assertion it is a political decision misses that it isn't and wasn't. Politicians very rarely lead on anything and I think we are foolish in thinking they do (or should or even could) - they respond to pushes and pulls, decisions on road and rail investment show that in spades. Your second point shows the same misunderstanding - as if a "reconfiguration" decision could be made by anyone centrally. That simply isn't how things change. Our logistic model and array of goods evolved from billions of separate decisions made all over the globe in the face of a multitude of social and technological changes. The idea we can decide to chop off A and keep B is naïve, indeed, the sense that we have that much control is naïve in the extreme.

There is plenty of evidence in this thread about what rail is good at and how it can compete. I've always found it a useful rule of thumb to reinforce success, not try and recover failure. I'm currently in the US for an extended period - the patterns of freight movement are fascinating, huge trains of bulk going (very) long distance, massive (and which I mean truly massive, often in an extremely ugly and imposing manner that is grossly over the top) road investment with huge numbers of lorries on a network of source, distribution and end-user that exceeds the UK by a factor of 10 or even more in it's complexity!

I'm reminded of Douglas Adams line in one of the Hitchhikers "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." To me, this can be misquoted to represent the mind-bogglingly complexity of small quantities able to go point to point (including via some distributed hubs) via lorries/vans and the road network which simultaneously offers people the same opportunity to go point to point - and the sheer connectivity/opportunity that offers over a hub&spoke system or one which requires any centralised control. Plus I love Douglas Adams way of putting and viewing things and never miss an opportunity to shoehorn it in somewhere ​

 

[edwin_m]

On the historical point, when the rail network was at its height the only other method of transporting goods (discounting the few places where water transport was viable) was the horse and cart. Not only did they have a maximum practicable range of a few miles, they also increased costs considerably for any facility that relied on them compared to one with its own siding (a precursor of the trans-shipment costs which cripple the economics of modern railfreight?). Many of the branch lines that we now see as unnecessary weren't built by the large rail companies as a means of boosting their profit, but by (or by the rail company after pressure from) the owners of local industries who saw that they would be uncompetitive without rail access. In the Victorian era nobody really foresaw that the internal combustion engine, and two world wars to spur vehicle development, would make goods transport by road increasingly viable over longer distances. So they probably anticipated that as long as the local branch line didn't actually lose money it would prove to be a valuable asset in perpetuity.

 

[A0wen]

I wouldn't waste too much energy figuring how to get newspapers back onto rail. As any fule kno, the printed newspaper business is in terminal decline.

Absolutely right - also ignores the fact that centralised printing from London hasn't been the way it's been done for many years. All newspaper groups have more than one printing site, so the copy of whichever newspaper you choose you buy in North Wales is very unlikely to have been printed in London.

 

[Dai Corner]

Absolutely right - also ignores the fact that centralised printing from London hasn't been the way it's been done for many years. All newspaper groups have more than one printing site, so the copy of whichever newspaper you choose you buy in North Wales is very unlikely to have been printed in London.

Back in the day, it would probably have been printed in Manchester. Mail for Ireland would have been on overnight trains from Euston to Holyhead though.

 

[Jimini]

Back in the day, it would probably have been printed in Manchester. Mail for Ireland would have been on overnight trains from Euston to Holyhead though.

Mainly Liverpool (Sun / Times / Telegraph / FT / Sport / Mail) and Oldham (Mirror / Guardian / I / Racing Post) these days.

 

[matacaster]

Kill two chickens in one go and have KFC do on-train catering?

As I understand it KFC recently tried some vegan chicken offerings ie without any chicken.