As a supporter of railfreight that's disappointing to hear, especially as it's not that many years ago when I seem to remember alot of railborne Class 66 hauled car traffic coming out of the port. What happened?
I seem to remember some issues being reported about vandalism/stone throwing and possibly icicles in the tunnels but I doubt that would have killed things off. I wouldn’t know when the last train ran, but I’ve been back living here for three years now and freight had been almost non-existent and no car runs in this time as far as a I am aware. All I’ve seen are new train deliveries in 2019 (which brought us some interesting traction, highlight probably the pair of 20s), stone last summer and the new steel traffic in recent weeks. I don’t think there was any revenue earning traffic in 2020.
The port has immediate access to the M5 motorway so I guess it’s quite convenient to move things out by road, and with cars probably easy to take them direct to dealerships in the sort of small loads that would entail rather than to move them to another hub with extra handling.
There were some trains bringing gypsum in for the plasterboard factory in early 2016 which I think was only a trial but seemed to have been running for a couple of months at least.
With things having been so quiet it feels like a lost opportunity to have cracked on with the disruptive work of restoring the line for passenger use, but that‘s still tied up in the planning and financial bureaucracy.
