No, the reach stacker arm could not lift the container clear of the wagon without contacting the wire, unless it raised beyond the max pantograph height.
If you've got the room for it, the best option would be to have an Arrival/Departure line before the fan, where the electric can runround then push the wagons onto the loading pad. Or just fit a battery in. Electric freight only really needs enough length so that trains can get clear of the main line before switching to secondary power, or be able to wait for the road under OLE power.
Wasn't someone doing a battery conversion for 08s?
You might be able to use a unimog or equivalent to do so - the US uses them for shunting single-figure rakes of wagons around industrial units. However you also need the brake force to stop the wagons, which is why you can't just buffer up and send a wagon rolling over the hump.
Can you connect OLE designs for different speeds? To put it another way, the electrified main lines are not 125mph in the terminal stations. Is the OLE in the station only capable of the speeds trains should be doing there? When I word it like that it seems obvious.
Good point, forgot about braking! Do shunters (eg 08) have to connect the brakes in yards, or do they rely on the shunter's brakes until someone puts the handbrakes on?
Essentially, yes you can. You may need an extra OHNS or more tension lengths than necessary to manage the different tensions and bracing arrangements but it's possible. At a station due to the pointwork and so on you'll have separate tension lengths anyway, and you can see that terminal platforms are not braced and tensioned to the same standards as on the full 125mph line.
Various factors come into play. Most obviously massive amounts of coal traffic have gone for ever, turning some once-busy parts of the network into freight deserts. More generally there has been a trend to longer/ heavier trains, so you might see 'less' freight but its still moving, in far fewer trains.
Very little power is needed to accelerate a train to walking pace on level track. Have a look the specifications for Clayton's range of battery shunters.
claytonequipment.co.uk
The trains destination was Avonmouth Docks. Unfortunately, I can’t remember much more about it.
It does strike me that this proposal is realistic in terms of both spend profile and rate of electrification. And I suspect that in re-thinking our railway for the post-Covid, low carbon, automated road transport world we are going to find that the principal value streams are freight and transport between, into and around cities. So electrification for freight on routes with low passenger usage may make complete sense. And in any case, if secondary route passenger does survive, why can't a three-car EMU (which is what most of the secondary routes posted for electrification in this study have) trundle along happily at 75mph on the infrastructure installed for heavy freight!
It really isn't. We've laboured badly to provide even 100 route miles of the GWML electrification.
Yes
No, this is where batteries come in
It can easily do this, if this provides the service people want.
Indeed.
That’s more because “we” tackled it like a bunch of rank amateurs. With a lack of understanding what was involved, a lack of investigating the existing infrastructure and ground conditions, mismanagement and incompetence, plus a totally unrealistic timetable of works (which also did not take enough account of normal maintenance and existing infrastructure renewal works).
I have yet to see any real evidence of this though.
Why will automated road transport destroy passenger traffic but not freight operations?
Because it is hopelessly uneconomic?
Freight haul at any speed demands a heck of a lot of energy. OK, so regenerative braking gets some of it back, but I suspect that batteries would need to achieve another order of magnitude improvement in energy density to cope with the off-wire sections of Felixstowe - Nuneaton, for example.
Because the railway cannot just try to stay as it is for ever - it has to change or cease to be relevant.
Because rail has a much bigger inherent energy efficiency advantage for freight.
That's right - which is why city to city and city to surrounding urban area passenger flows will survive, but secondary and rural routes won't
It does, for bulk flows - and better road/rail integration would make the minimum economic rail haul shorter for intermodal as well.
That's partly because the UK railway is optimised for passenger traffic and freight has to just fit in round it. And as energy costs increase rail freight gets more economic.
The point somebody was making was that you shouldn't electrify secondary routes to freight standards because it wouldn't suit passenger traffic. If there ceases to be any secondary passenger traffic the problem goes away! In fact I am not all that convinced by the "cheap electrification for freight" idea. Power draws aren't going to be that different. Is speed alone such a big factor in cost? I am not an OLE engineer - maybe there is someone out there who can tell us.
Will struggle to overcome the basic geography of our island being rather small, and freight flows being from all over the place to all over the place.
Channel Tunnel is perhaps the only place in the 'UK' where freight moving at >75mph might make a meaningful benefit to pathing. But I suspect the access charges would still remain high.
There must be some decent flows amongst the 2 million trucks that go through Dover every year.
Having to change does not mean that any change is good though! Freight is a hopelessly unrenumerative flow for the railway and this isn't going to change without epochal changes in both the economy and the wider logistics industry. And those changes are probably not going to happen.
Electrification of road freight is going to put energy costs through the floor, even with the current elevated electricity price. Remember that road freight already pays far more for fuel than diesel rail operations given that railfreight doesn't have to pay the bulk of the tax on diesel.
Once you remove all sections of railway that fit "city to city" and "city to surrounding urban areas" definitions from the rail system, there is precious little left!
The only real way to improve road/rail integration would be a rolling highway/TOFC, and that unfortunately is not going to happen given our loading gauge limitations. Otherwise you have the fundamental cost of lifting a container and putting it on a trailer, which costs money, requires staff and requires fixed capital equipment.
Why would we optimise for a traffic category that provides about 0.6% of Network Rail's revenue? Even if freight traffic went up by an order of magnitude it would still not pay a nationally significant amount without large increases in the payment per tonne-km, and freight fundamentally can't bear such an increase in costs.
Now if HS1 had been built to the loading guage of the Chunnel itself we could make an argument for running Chunnel shuttles direct from the M25 to Calais, but it wasn't so we can't!
What does that actually mean? This word “metro” keeps being banded around as if it’s something new. It’s not. And neither are trains that run in urban areas.
While I generally agree, there should be some gaps. As this is the only realistic way that maintenance staff can get in at busy junctions if there is a failure. Unless you want every single train going over the junction to be delayed until the middle of the night…
Isn’t that your metro-isation?
Hmm, we will have to wait and see. Battery powered delivery lorries currently are generally restricted to use inside cities and urban areas, as they don’t have the range. Plus, it was not that long ago, people on here were arguing that our electricity distribution system won’t be able to cope with private electric cars. So fleets of freight vehicles would be an even greater problem without additional infrastructure.
Hmm, keep in mind that new lines are currently being built, and new stations are being built on existing lines. People have written off the railways multiple times before…
Engineering of junctions and other infrastructure should avoid single points of failure and generally be engineered to reduce the number of expensive shutdowns.
Staff are expensive, incredibly expensive.
Fuel consumption for freight road vehicles is actually smaller than for private cars.
Because subsidies are provided to support freight operations for political reasons.... just like the rest of the railway, but more extreme.
Correct. Vast subsidies are provided to ROAD freight operations for political reasons, which far outweigh any given to railfreight, a fact you constantly ignore. This subsidy is in the form of a cross subsidy from the private motorist who pays for the road system that HGVs have virtually free use of.
I wouldn't call £1,000 vehicle excise duty and £5000 fuel duty per annum free use of the road for an HGV. Rail freight is great for moving bulk loads, aggregate etc, but the majority of freight is small amounts from one place nowhere near a railway to several other places equally nowhere near a railway. My company did try to use rail freight, but by the time you had loaded the lorry and taken it to the nearest rail depot, and then sent another lorry to collect it from its destination and deliver to several different addresses in the locality, it was quicker, easier and cheaper to use one lorry for the whole journey.Correct. Vast subsidies are provided to ROAD freight operations for political reasons, which far outweigh any given to railfreight, a fact you constantly ignore. This subsidy is in the form of a cross subsidy from the private motorist who pays for the road system that HGVs have virtually free use of.
The small subsidy to rail freight is recognition of its vastly superior ecological footprint, which will not be lost IF long distance electric HGVs ever arrive. It is no use generating renewable energy if we are to squander it on road vehicles which burn 3x as much to get goods from A to B. This is caused by the friction of rubber tyres which, of course cause their own extra problems in rubber debris. We could cure the problem by fitting HGVs with steel wheels and run them on steel rails!
I said "virtually". £6000pa may sound a lot of money but the turnover pa of the average 44t HGV is over £300,000, so as the entire track access charge it is a bargain.
Taking only two of the taxes paid by HGVs, fuel duty and VAT on fuel raises a very large sum.
There are several problems with drawing general conclusions from such a study though.
VAT on road fuel has gone up from 17.5% to 20%.
This is a government spreadsheet for the road maintenance costs in England - https://assets.publishing.service.g...loads/attachment_data/file/775452/rdc0310.ods
...but that's exactly what does happen in a hump sorting yard - then you use retarders in the track beyond the hump to regulate the speed of wagons so (in theory!) they stop at the desired position in the sorting siding.
But the point is in the UK we don't do hump sorting any more, because of the need to install retarders to regulate the speed of the wagons. The old days of brakeman running after each cut are long gone. Germany and the Netherlands still do hump sorting, but they're managing a much bigger volume of traffic and mix of routings, so the cost of retarders is justified.
sct-rail.co.uk
www.zagro-group.com