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What future for rail freight?

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Photohunter71

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Not sure if this is the correct place to post this topic, Mods feel free to move to the appropriate listing.


With the demise of coal on the cards,what is the future for rail freight? Will we see an increase in containers? Will the government be forced to use biomass power stations in the form that Drax will be,which will require lots of hopper movements by rail. What is the future?
 
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PhilipF

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Lot of quarries dispatch their stone by rail. Also the network has been improved on some lines to allow for trains of containers to use that route. Not sure how much fuel is transported by rail - sure some is.
 

sprinterguy

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Id love to know why you think you'd see more containers just because coal has decreased/stopped.
An increase in rail borne container traffic is widely expected over the next ten years or so. There's a lot of investment proposed in trunk routes from ports that reflects this, and one of the stipulations of the last Essex Thameside franchise bid, to factor into timetable considerations, was to expect a considerable increase in the number of container trains from Tilbury.

I expect that the downturn in traditionally dominant bulk flows such as coal and steel that we're witnessing at present, and is discussed at length in the thread linked above, could all but spell the demise of DB Schenker as a railfreight operator, who have shown the same aptitude for holding onto traffic as a sieve does for retaining water. As EWS, they were essentially gifted the sum of the country's bulk railfreight flows (excepting intermodal), and as well as the rapid decline in most traditional heavy industry sectors, they have been losing this traffic hand over fist to their competitors. F'rinstance, their big red coal hoppers used to be a ubiquitous sight everywhere around the north east of England, whereas now you hardly ever seem to see them in preference to the swathes of gunmetal grey wagons in evidence with Freightliner (there's an operation who have expanded well beyond their original remit) and GB Railfreight (built their business up from scratch), due to EWS/DB Schenker's inability or unwillingness to adapt to the changing nature of these flows.
 
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Freightmaster

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Although DBS has certainly lost a lot of traffic to other operators in recent years,
what a lot of people don't realise is that almost 90% of 'new to rail' freight contracts
in the same period have been won by DB - the other operators mainly grow their
business by 'poaching' traffic from other FOCs...

Going back to the original question, the big growth traffic these days
is not intermodal but aggregate traffic, which is growing almost as fast
as coal traffic is declining - in fact, growth is currently constrained by a
lack of wagons, which is why DB are using several rakes of HTAs (bogie
coal hoppers) on stone traffic, and GBRf are converting some of their
hoppers for the same purpose.

In fact, the big loser in all this is not DBS but FHH, which has lost
almost half of its work over the past 18 months (not just coal, but
also aggregate and cement traffic)


MARK
 

sprinterguy

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Although DBS has certainly lost a lot of traffic to other operators in recent years,
what a lot of people don't realise is that almost 90% of 'new to rail' freight contracts
in the same period have been won by DB - the other operators mainly grow their
business by 'poaching' traffic from other FOCs...
That's interesting to see the reality of the situation, rather than how I perceive it. I hadn't realised that DB Schenker had gained the majority of 'new to rail' freight contracts, or that Heavy Haul had lost half it's work.

It also helps to assuage my curiosity as to what all those HTA hoppers are doing now - There must be hundreds of them, but I just don't see them very often any more (though I am probably not looking very hard, or in the right places).
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
Not according to Modern Railways in December. They are pretty adamant that the container boom is now over.
Seems I may be wrong on both counts! :oops: Although all future planning for the railfreight industry, in terms of pathing and investment, still seems to point to the contrary?
 
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Photohunter71

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Id love to know why you think you'd see more containers just because coal has decreased/stopped.

The reasons I ask the question is with DRS getting 10xCl 88's what traffic can they be expected to be haulage power for? And, as coal declines, what traffic are the like of DBS, DRS, freightliner, GBRf and CRF (Colas rail Freight) going to pick up? There was a projected rise in container freight on the cards but on reading some posts,that seems not the case.

Thanks for the link NajaB, a very interesting discussion!
 

The Planner

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Not according to Modern Railways in December. They are pretty adamant that the container boom is now over.

In which case a lot of analysts are getting things very wrong, the growth of Class 4 traffic which intermodal traffic tends to be, is always assumed.
 

GB

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Intermodal trains are getting longer. More trains are serving ports. Bigger and bigger ships are calling at ports and ports are going through extensive upgrade plans to accommodate them.

There's certainly peaks and troughs to intermodal traffic but its difficult to see the "boom" is over.
 

HowardGWR

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Intermodal trains are getting longer. More trains are serving ports. Bigger and bigger ships are calling at ports and ports are going through extensive upgrade plans to accommodate them.

There's certainly peaks and troughs to intermodal traffic but its difficult to see the "boom" is over.
What boom? Perhaps a transfer from road to rail because port to distribution point has aided rail's competitive provision.

What will affect this port container traffic is whether imports will grow, or indeed, whether exports will grow.
 

swt_passenger

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Intermodal trains are getting longer. More trains are serving ports. Bigger and bigger ships are calling at ports and ports are going through extensive upgrade plans to accommodate them.

There's certainly peaks and troughs to intermodal traffic but its difficult to see the "boom" is over.

The Modern Railways article is fairly convincing, but I don't think I can copy it out...
 

muddythefish

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I think I read something like only 25-30 per cent of container traffic from Felixstowe and Southampton go by rail, plus there's virtually no/little container traffic from the likes of Liverpool, Bristol and northern east coast ports. I know Felixstowe has capacity constraints on the line into the port but its shows there's still a very big market there for rail to go for.
 

GearJammer

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I think I read something like only 25-30 per cent of container traffic from Felixstowe and Southampton go by rail, plus there's virtually no/little container traffic from the likes of Liverpool, Bristol and northern east coast ports. I know Felixstowe has capacity constraints on the line into the port but its shows there's still a very big market there for rail to go for.

Not really, no point putting boxes on the train if the train doesn't go to where they are needed. Which is the customers door!
 

edwin_m

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I think I read something like only 25-30 per cent of container traffic from Felixstowe and Southampton go by rail, plus there's virtually no/little container traffic from the likes of Liverpool, Bristol and northern east coast ports. I know Felixstowe has capacity constraints on the line into the port but its shows there's still a very big market there for rail to go for.

In theory yes. However the break-even distance for rail to be competitive on a box move is quite long. If a truck has to be sent to a container terminal it doesn't cost much more to send it all the way to the port, at least if that can be done and back within the driver's working shift. The problems for rail are further compounded by the need to run to a timetable that doesn't match the ships, so that even if the train journey itself is faster a truck will probably be quicker overall. Coastal shipping is also an option for less time-critical consignments. So for containers rail is competing on price rather than speed (this probably explains in part the 75% real terms fall in rates since the 60s mentioned in Modern Railways).

As a first approximation the origin/destination pattern of containers is likely to match the distribution of population. For Felixstowe and Southampton the densely populated parts of the South-East mostly lie within the out-and-back limit. The rest of this region, along with the south-west, doesn't have enough people to generate enough boxes to fill many regular trains.

Thus the main market for rail haulage of marine containers is the populated areas of the Midlands, northern England and Scotland, and it is no surprise that nearly all the trains take this route. Taking out time-critical consignments and the slice of the remainder going to areas where rail can't compete, rail is probably close to its ceiling at Felixstowe and Southampton.

For ports further north the situation is reversed, with Northern England and much of the Midlands too close for rail to be competitive but some opportunities to the South East and Scotland. However these are the same routes already used by Felixstowe and Southampton traffic. In the case of the South East there is also the shortage of terminals, the many problems of creating new ones, and the fact that a terminal in a suitably "central" location will be difficult for road vehicles to access due to traffic congestion. Bristol probably has the least potential for rail of all the major ports, with a large slice of the population accessible out and back within a truck driver's shift.

The overall market for containers has been growing strongly in recent years but one has to question how long this will continue, given that the capacity of the UK to absorb Chinese goods must find a limit sometime. Then the rate of increase in container numbers may be little more than that of the population. Rail may gain a little more as congestion and driver hours restrictions make road slightly less competitive, infrastructure improvements feed through, and individual flows increase enough to make economies of scale more significant. But I personally think talk of marine container numbers on rail doubling is illusory.

The opportunity may be more in domestic freight, but that's for another post.
 
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Daz9284

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The reasons I ask the question is with DRS getting 10xCl 88's what traffic can they be expected to be haulage power for? And, as coal declines, what traffic are the like of DBS, DRS, freightliner, GBRf and CRF (Colas rail Freight) going to pick up? There was a projected rise in container freight on the cards but on reading some posts,that seems not the case.

Thanks for the link NajaB, a very interesting discussion!

Well FLHH are going to be sending more 66's to Poland, and they are scrapping 3 rakes (think 63) of their coal wagons. The bogies are being saved and sent to poland, where they are going to be used for bogies on new aggregate box wagons for FLHH.

regards,
darryl
 
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