Small Load Railfreight

[ChiefPlanner]

Road can deliver door to door , rail is only an element of the trunk haulage and needs expensive pre-planned paths on a (passenger) railway - rail needs terminal and loading facilities - usually only economic when you have a large volume.

Etc ....etc ......

"BR" came out a comprehensive (city and country based) distribution depot in the 1960;s as the economy increasingly geared towards a road based network - it has not ,and can probably not be won back.

 

[142094]

Someone has pointed out that many of the sidings where you could once load/unload trains have disappered, so there would have to be a large capital investment to get those open again.

Think this year was the first year in 100 years or so where the majority of freight transported on the railway was not coal (was in fact containers).

 

[ChiefPlanner]

Thats right ! - deep sea container traffic is a pretty steady , volume constant traffic on selected routes. Clearing Soton for 9'6 boxes on normal wagons has really pushed up the loadings , as did the clearance from Felixstowe some years back. The railway is really a key part of the international logistics chain , doing well with planned , regular , high volume flows.

Coal traffic is much more "awkward" as flows often depend on "spot" markets for imported flows , and re-distribution of opencast and deep mined coal depending on the purchasing policies of the generators.