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!