Did BR Sectorisation Kill Mail by Rail? Can it Return?

[Masbroughlad]

Was BR sectorisation instrumental in the start of the demise of mail, parcels etc by rail?

I know it carried on for a while after sectorisation and privatisation, but did the rot set in earlier?

Under BR, staff, facilities and trains themselves catered for passengers AND mail at the same time, so sharing costs. Station and Royal Mail staff would put mail into the guard vans of passenger trains. Immediately, when split up, extra staff were needed, vehicles and facilities weren't shared.

Privatisation and profits killed it off eventually. Will it ever come back?

When the railway is state run again, the Royal Mail won't be. So, it would have to be fundamentally different.

I guess that years ago, when services, utilities and infrastructure were all state owned, there were no financial boundaries. Now, everyone has to make a profit in their own right - no bigger picture.

I do sometimes wonder whether there would be scope for the private delivery companies to work with train operators in the future? Problem is, passenger trains don't have space for anything other than people these days....

 

[Clarence Yard]

No, it wasn’t Sectorisation or Privatisation that killed mail on rail - it was Royal Mail who wanted to get out of all that double manual handling so traffic started to go by road (or air) instead of rail.

Dedicated mail trains were part of BR’s defence against this. Moving Royal Mail traffic in bulk provided a respite from the gradual loss of traffic, for a time at least.

 

[JLH4AC]

BR’s courier service Red Star Parcels which used passenger trains for transporting parcels between passenger railway stations was a profitable concern.

Privatisation and the aftermath of the Hatfield rail crash led to the downfall of Red Star Parcels. Privatisation caused many complexities in coming to agreements with TOCs to transport parcels on passenger trains, while the speed restrictions and disruptions from the crash created further challenges resulting in Lynx Express closing Red Star down.

The decline of mail trains started before sectorisation due to frequent delays in mail delivery and the increased efficiency of mechanical sorting over manual processing on moving trains.
In 1993 Rail Express Systems and Royal Mail launched a £150 million initiative aimed at revitalizing rail mail services, however the same mass speed restrictions and disruptions that resulted in the closure of Red Star caused Royal Mail to reduce its mail train operations. By 2024, high energy costs and an aging fleet led to the discontinuation of dedicated mail trains by Royal Mail.

 

[D365]

By 2024, high energy costs and an aging fleet led to the discontinuation of dedicated mail trains by Royal Mail.

”Aging fleet” was PR guff - the 325s were due for overhaul but mechanically they were in better condition than any vehicles of that age I or my colleagues have seen.

Energy costs is of course still a serious concern within the freight sector.

 

[Magdalia]

the increased efficiency of mechanical sorting over manual processing on moving trains.

This is an important point that I'd not considered before. Rail had a competitive advantage when sorting was manual because the sorting and the travelling could be done simultaneously.

Another important factor, which eroded rail's journey time advantage, was the steady improvement to the road network especially motorways.

There was a similar situation with distribution of newspapers where use of rail collapsed very quickly after News International found a way to distribute by road instead, and quickly enough not to need sorting on the move.

 

[deltic]

The volume of letter mail also collapsed reducing demand for bulk haulage.

It is notable that Royal Mail have also reduced their use of air for domestic deliveries. Supposedly for environmental reasons but in reality to reduce costs and because the volume of mail is not there to justify it.

 

[RT4038]

'Traditional' movement of mail by rail has ceased in most countries across the world, so I suspect that the whole model of doing so has been superceded, rather than a particular organisational policy of an individual country / railway undertaking.

 

[JLH4AC]

”Aging fleet” was PR guff - the 325s were due for overhaul but mechanically they were in better condition than any vehicles of that age I or my colleagues have seen.

Energy costs is of course still a serious concern within the freight sector.

It was my understanding that the 325s that aside from needing an overhaul due to their age were in a generally good condition, but Royal Mail couldn't/wouldn't justify the costs be it because of a genuinely poor economic case for it or just because Royal Mail wanted to do away with dedicated mail trains. I can't say which is true without the internal figures on the overhaul costs, though I do think it is likely that Royal Mail's reasoning was sortshighted or was a false economy.

 

[Helvellyn]

To go back to the OP's question it wasn't sectorisation that finished off mail by rail. The services had to be profitable, or at least break even, so smaller flows might have gone. But even in the 1980s BR was using surplus DMUs for smaller flows. There was several suggestions of a second generation DMU for parcels being ordered but it never materialised.

Look at how many Royal Mail depots are near a station for examples of how Mail and Rail tried to co-exist. However, the slow pace of Royal Mail modernisation when state owned probably didn't help though. Many sorting depots were still tied to large town/city centre premises with Post Offices (and even BT exchanges from GPO days) when the Post Offices could probably have moved to pure retail unit location (cheaper building) and the sorting office to an out of town location.

Rail Net certainly helped keep the traffic post privatisation but various factors referred to by others above eventually killed it off.

Could Mail by rail come back? Not for letters and only for parcels if there was a way of linking major distribution centres, whether Royal Mail or Amazon. Then you'd need to find the paths which isn't easy.

In another world former BR Marshalling Yards that were quickly white elephants were redeveloped as major warehouse sites, with rail connections, and still have an active role in parcels distribution hub to hub.

 

[Grumpy]

Look at how many Royal Mail depots are near a station

Are there any Royal Mail Mail Centres or Distribution Centres anywhere near a station?
Motorway junctions, yes

 

[Helvellyn]

Are there any Royal Mail Mail Centres or Distribution Centres anywhere near a station?
Motorway junctions, yes

Off the top of my head - when mail was using rail - Crewe, Preston, Wellingborough, Bristol Temple Meads, Leicester, Manchester Picadilly.

 

[dubscottie]

EWS killed it. They had a monopoly so could charge what they wanted. Royal Mail said no eventually and looked at other options and never went back.
My opinion is that the sale of all the freight companies (bar Freightliner) and RES to EWS killed mail and freight by rail.
DRS etc had to start from scratch and invest in wagons etc while EWS got almost all the ex BR wagon fleet.
There was an article in RAIL or Railway Magazine with the then new boss of Royal Mail, and they put the blame squarely on the ridiculous charges EWS wanted.

 

[Grumpy]

Off the top of my head - when mail was using rail - Crewe, Preston, Wellingborough, Bristol Temple Meads, Leicester, Manchester Picadilly.

I mis-read your post when you put "are near" i.e. presently as opposed to in the past. 40 years ago most of them, today hardly any-if any at all.

 

[The exile]

Off the top of my head - when mail was using rail - Crewe, Preston, Wellingborough, Bristol Temple Meads, Leicester, Manchester Picadilly.

Wasn’t a brand new one built at Stoke Gifford - right next to Bristol Parkway?

 

[Clarence Yard]

EWS killed it. They had a monopoly so could charge what they wanted. Royal Mail said no eventually and looked at other options and never went back.
My opinion is that the sale of all the freight companies (bar Freightliner) and RES to EWS killed mail and freight by rail.
DRS etc had to start from scratch and invest in wagons etc while EWS got almost all the ex BR wagon fleet.
There was an article in RAIL or Railway Magazine with the then new boss of Royal Mail, and they put the blame squarely on the ridiculous charges EWS wanted.

Mail on rail had declined severely before those days. It was really only the dedicated trains that were left for RES/EWS to run and those were in retreat as well.

Royal Mail wanted reduced charges because they felt air/road (especially the latter) gave them more cost effective options. EWS were in no position to offer discounted rates and so it all ended. Royal Mail just wanted the cheapest method of transporting mail and that was by road.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

A number of stations also lost the ability to handle postal traffic, Leeds City being an example as the quite extensive set of mail sidings (formerly Wellington station) were turned into much-needed additional passenger platforms. It is of course far easier for the state to mandate the postal service to use the railway when both are owned and operated by state entities.

 

[ac6000cw]

It is of course far easier for the state to mandate the postal service to use the railway when both are owned and operated by state entities.

But why would you want to do that if it's overall less efficient?

In my teenage 'trainspotting years' in the early 1970s I spent many hours at Birmingham New Street, amongst other things idlily watching mail bags being unloaded by hand from passenger trains onto trolleys, which were then hauled by electric tractors through an underpass to the station mail/parcels dock, where they were transferred again to road transport to take them to the nearby central post office (and I assume some others further away). Doing all that (at both ends of the journey) must have cost a serious amount of money, so it's not at all surprising Royal Mail wanted/needed to re-think the whole operation.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

But why would you want to do that if it's overall less efficient?

In my teenage 'trainspotting years' in the early 1970s I spent many hours at Birmingham New Street, amongst other things idlily watching mail bags being unloaded by hand from passenger trains onto trolleys, which were then hauled by electric tractors through an underpass to the station mail/parcels dock, where they were transferred again to road transport to take them to the nearby central post office (and I assume some others further away). Doing all that (at both ends of the journey) must have cost a serious amount of money, so it's not at all surprising Royal Mail wanted/needed to re-think the whole operation.

That's a good question which I'm not qualified to answer. I was making no statement on the desirability of such a policy, just commenting that it should be easier for the state to enact a policy when it has control of all the levers.

 

[Taunton]

BR’s courier service Red Star Parcels which used passenger trains for transporting parcels between passenger railway stations was a profitable concern.

The big baseload for Red Star was important documents and important computer tapes. Both have been completely swept away by email attachments.

Royal Mail parcels was in decline until on-line shopping, driven initially by Amazon and then everyone else, picked up and then greatly exceeded the volume. Demand does change from time to time.

 

[Sun Chariot]

It is of course far easier for the state to mandate the postal service to use the railway when both are owned and operated by state entities.

Peter Johnson's book An Illustrated History of the Travelling Post Office cited reasons for TPO cessation by Jan 2004:
1) poor service-level by BR (regular delays to TPO services, due to loco and/or pathing issues),
2) Royal Mail's lack of appetite for investment into new TPO vehicles, as letter & value-package volumes were declining.

As others have said, a "minimal-handling" operating model - from RM distribution hubs to RM "last mile" - will offer cost efficiency over multi-mode and multiple points of handling.

 

[JLH4AC]

The big baseload for Red Star was important documents and important computer tapes. Both have been completely swept away by email attachments.

Royal Mail parcels was in decline until on-line shopping, driven initially by Amazon and then everyone else, picked up and then greatly exceeded the volume. Demand does change from time to time.

That decline happened after privatisation, parcel and registered letter demand was increasing during the early 90s though the UK mail sector was aware of the risk that cheaper fax and e-mail was due to have mail demand. Red Star did see weakening demand for its core services between privatisation and its closure but revenue from its core services was reported to be increasing in-till the Hatfield crash happened and effectively made reliable same day delivery by rail impossible thus making further restructuring efforts within the company pointless.

Demand does change from time to time but given there are a fair number of road based registered couriers that were set up around the late 1990s/early 2000s that are still around or were bought up as profitable concerns I do think that Red Star could have survived into the 2020s if the early 2000s was more hospitable to rail freight.

 

[Skimpot flyer]

The big baseload for Red Star was important documents and important computer tapes. Both have been completely swept away by email attachments.

Royal Mail parcels was in decline until on-line shopping, driven initially by Amazon and then everyone else, picked up and then greatly exceeded the volume. Demand does change from time to time.

When I joined Royal Mail, they had recently completed the set up of a division known as Streamline, a network for bulk postings that was seperate from the letter traffic network. There were 17 Regional Distribution Centres (RDCs) and the most recent addition was the one I started at, Northern Home Counties DC, on a business park in Hatfield, Hertfordshire (on the former British Aerospace site).
At our induction meeting, a group of us were asked to guesstimate how much of Royal Mail’s business was stamped letters. Most were way off. I said ‘less than 5%?’ and it was in fact 3.2% at that time.
Bulk mailings of things like bank / credit card statements, British Telecom bills, magazines, holiday brochures etc were sent directly into RDCs, sorted, dispatched to local mail centres or distant RDCs (then to their local MCs) and then mixed in with letter traffic to go to delivery offices.
Parcels were a tiny part of the traffic (and mostly handled by Parcelforce anyway).

The internet changed everything.

Most people started to get bills by email, bulk mailings started to slide dramatically, worsened by being opened up to competitors, who could pick up from the bulk mailing companies, do the sorting and pay RM to deliver the items using ‘downstream access’ arrangements.

If internet shopping hadn’t seen an explosion in small parcels and packets, I think RM would have gone bust.

In all my time at PRDC, the trains have only ever carried roll cages (known as Yorks) full of parcels, and trays of letters, the latter being a low percentage of the traffic. No sortation ever took place on the Class 325 trains This was to maximise the loading, which was 708 Yorks on a 12-car set.

 

[DarloRich]

Was BR sectorisation instrumental in the start of the demise of mail, parcels etc by rail?

no. Privatisation was more to blame. That and a massive decline in letters posted which happened before the "amazon" boom arrived.

 

[Skimpot flyer]

no. Privatisation was more to blame. That and a massive decline in letters posted which happened before the "amazon" boom arrived.

Privatisation of BR, or Privatisation of RM?
As explained above, letters posted (stamped traffic) were only a small part of Royal Mail’s business when I joined them in 1993. Mail traffic was booming at that time.

 

[The exile]

But why would you want to do that if it's overall less efficient?

You wouldn’t - however, I am suspicious of whether “overall” less efficient is always tested - a bit like two people each preferring to do 3 hours’ work each rather than 1 person taking 5 and a half hours to do it on their own.

 

[DarloRich]

Privatisation of BR,

BR - I just assumed the RM privatisation was even worse!

 

[Adrian Barr]

Peter Johnson's book An Illustrated History of the Travelling Post Office cited reasons for TPO cessation by Jan 2004:
1) poor service-level by BR (regular delays to TPO services, due to loco and/or pathing issues),
2) Royal Mail's lack of appetite for investment into new TPO vehicles, as letter & value-package volumes were declining.

The claims of poor service / regular delays have no real basis; it was an easy way of deflecting criticism of the decision to shut down the TPO network. JLH4AC makes a good point (post #3) about the performance meltdown due to speed restrictions imposed in the aftermath of the 2000 Hatfield accident - this undermined confidence in rail and no doubt contributed to the search for alternatives - but train performance had recovered well by 2003/2004.

This parliamentary research briefing (quoted below) is rather interesting: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN02251/SN02251.pdf

In 2003 EWS operated 49 trains per day for Royal Mail hauling 20 million items of mail, about 14 per cent of UK mail volumes a day and including one quarter of all first class mail, across Britain’s railway network. EWS said that the performance regime that these services operated to was the toughest regime on the rail network. Every service had to arrive within a ten minute window at every calling point. Services operated at punctuality levels of 93.5 per cent. 99.9 per cent of all trains ordered by Royal Mail operated. Apparently no mainland rail passenger operator met these performance levels so trains operated for Royal Mail were the best performing services on the rail network.

Those figures were based on performance over 17 months... I'm sure there are a lot of present-day passengers who would be overjoyed to get that level of "poor service and regular delays" from their train operator!

Originally the intention was to shut down the TPO network but retain rail for the movement of mail in bulk:

As part of a complete review of its road, rail and air network, Royal Mail announced last year that it intended to stop using rail for the distribution of First Class mail due to poor reliability, but would continue using rail for less time critical items. This would have increased the amount of mail distributed by rail from 14 per cent of the daily postbag of 82 million items to around 18 per cent.

It's not surprising that the sorting of mail on the move ended when it did, for reasons already mentioned:

Rail had a competitive advantage when sorting was manual because the sorting and the travelling could be done simultaneously.

Another important factor, which eroded rail's journey time advantage, was the steady improvement to the road network especially motorways.

At one time there would have been no other viable option for long-distance 1st class post other than the TPO network, but demand was falling at the same time as other cheaper transport options were available, combined with the possibilities of speedy mechanical sorting. While the end of the TPOs might have been inevitable, the complete loss of the mail contract in 2004 was more of a shock. I think it all boiled down to money in the end.

EWS killed it. They had a monopoly so could charge what they wanted. Royal Mail said no eventually and looked at other options and never went back.
My opinion is that the sale of all the freight companies (bar Freightliner) and RES to EWS killed mail and freight by rail.

I agree that EWS overplayed their hand, tried to charge too much for what was a lucrative contract, and got caught out when Royal Mail simply walked away...

This quote from Royal Mail (in the parliamentary briefing) gets to the crux of the matter, making a similar point:

...following the failure of protracted negotiations with rail freight supplier EWS over the transfer of existing services to the new network, Royal Mail has concluded that it has no alternative but to move forward with a restructure based on a road and air network only. Paul Bateson, Royal Mail’s Managing Director, Logistics, said: “There is a marked difference between the price we believe we should be paying for rail services and that which was on the table. Quite simply, other forms of transport can give us the same benefits, in terms of flexibility and quality, but at a lower cost.

Where I would disagree is the idea that the short-lived EWS monopoly killed freight by rail. During the 'glory days' of EWS under Ed Burkhart, there was a boom in wagonload "Enterprise" traffic for a start. Profitable contracts for bulk flows (and Royal Mail) were effectively subsidising wagonload freight and other loss-making contracts. Once other hauliers were able to bid for the profitable contracts, this drove down prices and profits, and cross-subsidy was no longer an option. Going back to the opening post, this creates a situation where everything has to be profitable in its own right, regardless of any bigger picture. On the plus side it creates a competitive market which gives more confidence to freight users, but the downside is that any traffic that can't turn a profit ends up being lost to rail.

 

[Clarence Yard]

That parliamentary briefing was the Royal Mail spin. RM wanted a price to continue which was comparable to other modes, which rail couldn’t ever meet, whoever was the operator.

My experience in 1970’s and 1980’s ER was, away from the TPO trains, a steady decline in Post Office traffic. The number of bags just seemed to gently decline over those years, especially to locations off the main routes.

 

[Simon75]

Stoke-on-Trent delivery office is by the railway station

 

[Grumpy]

The answer to the question originally posed is no and no.
Conveyance of Mail by rail was as for most freight-hopelessly uneconomic.
The Royal Mail business case in the early 1990’s showed that concentrating on road plus air would work operationally at significantly reduced cost.
However at that time RM targets(and senior manager bonuses) placed as much emphasis on first and second class letter service quality results as profits. There were worries about potential risks from road congestion eg blockages at night at such as Spaghetti junction.Hence the decision was made to “hedge” by keeping the rail option but reducing Costs through the Railnet project(mainly class 325 plus Willesden’s hub).
Currently RM is mainly focussed on money, not service quality