Tom Heap rides a freight train from Manchester to Crewe and hears about the challenges the industry faces running electric trains and getting more goods off road and onto rails.
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It was a bad day when the Red Star rail parcel and goods delivery service was axed. We had a small family company at the time it existed and used it frequently. Often it was possible to get orders to customers the same day, and if they ordered very late in the day we could drop off at the local Red Star depot and have it to them overnight, often it was ready for collection before the customer started work! And it was priced very well. It would be an ideal business model to reintroduce, someone should give it serious consideration.
This is what HS2 was designed to do – yet people cannot grasp that a huge increase in rail capacity is what is needed. Higher speed is simply current technology. The UK had redesignated its ports and changed its rail connectivity to increase (dramatically) the movement of freight by rail to and from our ports in particular. After achieving that we now need to move pedestrians away from freight lines and HS2 was designed to start that. It had to start in the South – more ports there – before moving North ASAP. But those who could not grasp HS2 as a concept have simply pushed the North's economy into touch. It truly beggars belief. If only they had remembered the identical situation with motorway development – who other than I remembers the two day car journey from Lancashire to Cornwall (with a ferry too) before Motorways? Yet we had the same misguided criticism over motorways. Do the people of the UK never learn?
Unfortunately not every port has a rail link the other problem is in the day their are too many passenger train's and at night time the track has to be maintained
But the government want more people back to work so this will destroy the HGV industry and Vans and at the same time the future will be self driven so for example by 2050 we might not see lorry drivers
We've cancelled the West Coast Relief Line (aka HS2) so how are we expecting any capacity for containers?
Totally nuts that HS2 won't run to Crewe, total waste of money.
Heaven help us. I dealt with rail deliveries back in the late 50s and they couldn't deliver then with tons of food arriving late and mouldy.
This clip starkly shows up exactly just how Fishi Rishi's cancellation of HS2 was just an attempt to grab votes and nothing to do with the future of the UK. More chance of giving large amounts of government money to his friends in the road transport industry than he would have by properly investing in the railways.
As a train driver in the Netherlands, I'm baffled to hear diesel is cheaper in the UK than electricity. Here in the Netherlands, it's the other way around.
We should use the rail ways more to keep the Lorrie’s off our roads . It s a night mare on motorways seeing all these Lorrie’s .bring back the railways
The class 90, top loco 👍👍👍
The movement of freight by rail around the UK is still impacted by the 4,500 miles of track closed by the Conservative government in the 1960's
My lordzzz class 90 cab ride
Yet in the country where #diesel was invented, most of the train lines are electrified!
Where are those 60 miles of overhead infill to be?
neoliberalism has got rid of all infrastructural aspirations of the UK
I really never considered that hs2 would provide relief on the network for more freight but it makes good sense.
For some reason Britain seems either slow or reluctant to move forward with better rail services.
In France for example the proportion of electrified lines is much higher.
Even worse was a line that existed between Manchester and Sheffield, as late as 1954 the line was electrified and a brand new twin track tunnel was built at Woodhead so the line could carry the overhead wiring.
The whole line was closed in 1981, what a total waste of money.
HAHAHAHAHAHA. The wheel turns full circle. Plenty of us have spent 40 years saying STOP THE LORRIES and GET GOODS BACK ON THE RAILWAYS. Were we listened to ? No. Which prison will the bought politicians and corrupt road-transport lobbyists be rotting in ?? None, I suspect. The rest of us have paid for the whole farce with our countryside, our communities, our jobs, our infrastructure and our health. Next up: 30 years from now: The public complains that builders should not have been given carte blanche to build houses all over our food growing land. Well, Well.
All this talk is nice but the fact is that cargo interests are driven by price and by time. Rail will always find it difficult to compete for road transport in Britain due to its geography. There is very little rail traffic in containers on the continent, or elsewhere for the distances that people normally think about.
Media: trains take trucks off the road.
Me: trucks reduce the train cost, genius.
Trains are for rich people. That's why oligarchs love it. And train operators want government subsidies. (From tax payers).
it only seams to me that your taking lorry's of the road for long haul ie from the pot to the distribution yard as none for our major cities have goods sidings or yards then once it arrives at your yard its back on to lorry's to complete the job i feel we need to reinstate freight distribution hubs at major rail station once again central to the point of delivery
Unfortunately due to the constant stream of union actions the railways are just not reliable enough.
The amount of death from ordinary citizens having to share the road with the merchant trader by eliminating rail and sucking on the fuel subsidy so they can continue with government support is one of the biggest failures of the government and one of the biggest contributors to whatever the earth protesters complain about.
Sky saw Geoff Marshals video and said can we copy that
Really good to see freight moving back onto the rails again, despite the state that the rail system might currently be in
Just need the government/DfT to pull their finger out and authorise some more electrification. Ooh and reinstate HS2 for capacity. But the Prime Miniature seems anti rail and anti environment. BTW: Tesco trains are amazing…. One container train taking nearly 60 Lorrie’s off the long haul.
I think it's cool but as a trainspotter don't agree to it as it puts truck drivers out of jobs
I mean hearing that Germany are lowering price on electric so more electric trains can run on the network on specific electrified bits on the line is great so it means no desiel trains under wires. But also, talking about the electric prices for the OHLE in UK, DB have withdrawn the fleet of electric locos called class 90s, the same loco, orangy one but a different operator. This is because Network Rail are increasing energy prices and yet they are trying to cut costs but also something they say is they try to be more environmental friendly. Putting up energy prices isn't helping. DB Schenker/Cargo are one of the biggest company also running trains in Germany. They only run electric locos on the HS1, Channel tunnel (Class 92's) at the moment but not on the UK main network like from Mossend (Scotland) to Daventry (Northamptonshire)
Wonder why my comment was deleted? Anyone else suffer the same fate?
Let's make all transport electric.
Let's postpone all transport logistics because electricity is too expensive
Waste of money I still have to pick the containers up onto my truck and deliver it to customs
I think what a lot of people forget is that the railways are not a toy train-set but rather are supposed to be a functional and reliable service to the public. There are far too many in the industry that are obsessed with HS2 to the detriment of actually providing the service that tax-payers are paying for.
Electrification in the UK is pitiful vs the rest of Europe. Even India, who started on a backfoot, is due to completely electrify 65000km at the end of the year, with dedicated double-stack freight corridors. Aside from climate concerns, electric power has always been known to offer way more efficiency. British Rail engineers would hang their heads in shame to see the level of electrification since they started in the 50s.