hi while on the subject can anyone rember what happened to the preposal about 12 years ago to start a service city to city on what I think was called a "land ferry" where passenger carriages and goods would be carried on the same service. The idea was to be able to goto the nearest terminal load up the goods trailer, caravan, m/home ect channel tunnel style and then sit in the passenger carriage to a destination then disembark to carry on the journey. I thought at the time what a brilliant idea as we did the west coast of scotland quite a lot and hated the trip up to glasgow.
You still dont get it.Lord Braykewynde said:So how come they seem to manage it in countries like France and Germany but it's impossible to do here?
Now think on that and get off the computer and stop sciving. I thought you had work to do
Patties Posies flowers will be dead by the time you get them to her .
I have never said its impossible, god here i say it again, get more haulage onto barges and train yes do it, every little helps, or maybe more than just a little.
50% of haulage is large 40 tonne loads maybe all that load is going to the same place and maybe its a few hundred miles away, and as long as it gets there all is fine.
load it onto trains, but don't forget at some point lorries will take over and still be used, hopefull they will be used as efficiently as they can.
The other 50% of haulage its just totally impracticable to use trains either because of time constraints or excessive costs or both.
Thats not going to change.
Its no different in Germany or France, so they use there superior rail network more, well its superior isnt it, so lets copy them it would help, but it wouldn't stop normal road haulage.
without wishing to sound funny, did you not read the second line of my post ? it clearly says unfortunately we do need some of them to deliver from cargo hub to the shops !.JonnyG said:
at trafford park we have a constant 24 hour que of lorries picking up and delivering freight to be taken by rail at the other end we have the same senario so somebody has done the costings and it obviousley appeals to them. i openly agree i am a passenger driver so i know nothing of the cost per parcel, what i have stated above is it is far cheaper and far more enviromental even with the older engines (of which there are only 32 left in mainline use these days) than it is to run 75 seperate lorries paying 75 seperate drivers and a few hundred staff to load off load them.
we dont carry individual parcels, we carry mostly what is termed "intermodel", a customer will load his own container deliver it to the rail hub we will do the distance work and he will collect it at the other end or we will collect and deliver using our sister company "freightliner".
there are talks of re instating "red star" once the countrys largest parcel carrier owned and operated by british rail, you turn up at the station in manchester hand your parcel in and 2 1/2 hours later its in london city center waiting to be collected.
you have been carefull not to say what it is you carry other than you have delivered the occasional train engine for re furbishment, im not sure if you where told at the time but all train engines are removed and re furbished every 500.000 miles regardless of whether they have a fault or not so you may have been carrying a fully servicable engine that was mileage expired !.
as i said right at the top of my post i accept that some road transport is needed, that has been bourn from our increasing reluctance to travel to the shops more than a mile or so the shops have had to come to us, but with a little forethought and planning a large amount of freight is still able to go by the more efficient means of rail travel.
i would have thought being a relatively mid distance haulier you would have welcomed quieter roads through long distance trucks being on the rails.
Gary i have stated openly proir to your "vested interest" post that i am all for the use of trains and barges and anything else that could be used to transport items at decent prices and indeed lower pollutants.
Its generalisations that make things seem so simple so easy and at the same time taint others because they see things slightly different.
Indeed we dont do general haulage as a rule, but times are hard so we do whatever. but mainly we are on the construction side.
delivering Lifts,for new construction and pumps for sewage works and power station ect all over the UK.
Its the sort of work that has to based around others when construction sites can take the load when engineers are there,that sort of thing.
Trains do not fit into that pattern, and so many types of haulage also have theses types of constrains placed onto them.
So i am not talking "vested interest" here Gary its the practicalities of the jobs.
Its not like we are the only ones doing this, construction is a massive part of the haulage industry always with booking in times or one constrain or another, or something needing to be delivered or collected at a minutes notice.
once last year and indeed the year before have had to run a large item to Germany, wait there and then bring it back.Not something you can rely on trains and outsourcing when a major pump or six metre rod needs immediate attention and rebuilding, and refitting Asap
Fine get everything you can onto trains,Again i say it doesn't effect us, or rather as i stated many posts ago "its not an option"and his lordship in his wisdom, deemed it was! and its not an option for many in the haulage industry too.
Its generalisations that make things seem so simple so easy and at the same time taint others because they see things slightly different.
Indeed we dont do general haulage as a rule, but times are hard so we do whatever. but mainly we are on the construction side.
delivering Lifts,for new construction and pumps for sewage works and power station ect all over the UK.
Its the sort of work that has to based around others when construction sites can take the load when engineers are there,that sort of thing.
Trains do not fit into that pattern, and so many types of haulage also have theses types of constrains placed onto them.
So i am not talking "vested interest" here Gary its the practicalities of the jobs.
Its not like we are the only ones doing this, construction is a massive part of the haulage industry always with booking in times or one constrain or another, or something needing to be delivered or collected at a minutes notice.
once last year and indeed the year before have had to run a large item to Germany, wait there and then bring it back.Not something you can rely on trains and outsourcing when a major pump or six metre rod needs immediate attention and rebuilding, and refitting Asap
Fine get everything you can onto trains,Again i say it doesn't effect us, or rather as i stated many posts ago "its not an option"and his lordship in his wisdom, deemed it was! and its not an option for many in the haulage industry too.
Colin
I think you will find the biggest problem in the UK as opposed to Europe is the guage of our railways and when I say guage I mean tunnel guage all our coaches and wagons whether lowbacks or not are narrower than Europe and this makes things a bit more difficult for us.
Do I know what I am talking about not really only experiance was that I sole 100 Diesel electric locomotives to Iran 32 to Syrian Railways and 10 to Sri Lanka railways in fact the same or similar to the class 66 bought for the British rail system manufactured in America by GM except ours had a better engine more enviromentally freindly and better consumption plust the fact the power units were built here on merseyside. but thats another story
John
I think you will find the biggest problem in the UK as opposed to Europe is the guage of our railways and when I say guage I mean tunnel guage all our coaches and wagons whether lowbacks or not are narrower than Europe and this makes things a bit more difficult for us.
Do I know what I am talking about not really only experiance was that I sole 100 Diesel electric locomotives to Iran 32 to Syrian Railways and 10 to Sri Lanka railways in fact the same or similar to the class 66 bought for the British rail system manufactured in America by GM except ours had a better engine more enviromentally freindly and better consumption plust the fact the power units were built here on merseyside. but thats another story
John
Please will someone tell me why we are going to spend £17. 4 billion on a new railway between London and Birmingham?
Absolutely bonkers and imo a complete and utter waste of tax payers hard earned cash!
Will it reduce HGV traffic? I doubt it.
Absolutely bonkers and imo a complete and utter waste of tax payers hard earned cash!
Will it reduce HGV traffic? I doubt it.
quite simply because the government of yesterday and the new co alition have all agreed that it was a big mistake to reduce capacity in the beeching days and now it will cost a hell of a lot of money to replace what we already had.Dustydog said:Please will someone tell me why we are going to spend £17. 4 billion on a new railway between London and Birmingham?
Absolutely bonkers and imo a complete and utter waste of tax payers hard earned cash!
Will it reduce HGV traffic? I doubt it.
the only real difference is that they are actually looking at the future this time as well as now and rather than following the curving lines of the current west coast main line they are going to build it straighter so higher speeds can be attained. 180 to 200 mph is quite feasable.
the investment of 17 billion pales in to insignificance when you work out the savings it will create over its lifetime and the increased investment by companies who at the moment refuse to invest in the uk due to congestion, figures of over 100 billion pounds are being muted for potential foreign investment.
of course the main objective is that all passenger trains will use the new high speed link which will release the original 125 mph west coast main line to freight and local passenger use.
remember also that the line to birmingham is phase one, phase two see's the line continue to manchester and phase 3 to scotland, we have the potential for london to glasgow in around 3 hours with this new line.
"3 hours London to Glasgow"
It'll never work 3 hours, 2 hours, or even 20 minutes. Why would anyone want to travel to Glasgow!
It'll never work 3 hours, 2 hours, or even 20 minutes. Why would anyone want to travel to Glasgow!
this is the service i mentioned earlier, unfortunately when the funding was in place the company that wanted to build and run the line was opposed by quite a few councils in the south, most of the proposals for the north where passed. some of the objections where as silly as too much noise yet the line would run on existing track beds closed by beeching and one i believe objected since the track bed was now used as a footpath.colin-yorkshire said:
it was an exciting proposition and would be almost complete now if allowed to happen in 1996 when it was proposed, right up to last year information on the company (central railways) was available on the net as was the route but it appears to have suddenly disapeared even though the company filed its operating books in jan this year.
another stumbling block is that the last government allowed national grid to use the 3rd and last remaining free tunnel at woodhead for cables to the other side of the pennines, although not impossible this does make it hard to run trains through the tunnel now since the cables require 24 hour maintenance and railways rules do not allow any person to be in a tunnel that is open to trains any more.
i do know that this route is still being talked about but whats happened to the web site is un clear.
the only info i can find is this ; http://www.parliament.uk/briefingpapers/commons/lib/research/briefings/snbt-00688.pdf
i take it you are talking about the "T2" engine now fitted to the new class 66 locomotives being supplied to freightliner, as you say unfortunately when ews (now german owned db shenker) ordered the original class 66 loco's they specified a lower gearing to increase the top speed but this did mean higher immissions and heavier fuel consumption. the class is based on the older class 59 and was offered to ews and freightliner by general motors of ontario canada with the model number JT42CWR, off memory i think around 250 loco's where ordered and delivered allthough many more have now been ordered too.John_374564913 said:
over the last 2 to 3 years all the new orders for class 66 loco's have been built with the new "low emmision / low consumption" engines, im not sure who you work for or who's engines you sell but the reliability and economy of these loco's is without question although driver comfort leaves a lot to be desired
we now of course have the new class 70's arriving and a lot are allready in use on the network, these loco's are a lot more powerfull than the class 66 at 3690 bhp but they have lower emmisions and fuel consumption than the class 66 too, such a shame the crane driver at the docks didnt like them too much though as can be seen here http://martinturner.fotopic.net/p68663398.html he dropped this loco number 70 012 from around 20 feet back in to the ships hold, the loco is a write off and the ship needs extensive repairs to make it sea worthy again.
it has nothing to do with 4x4's but it's the way the conversation has run, it's like any long conversation, you start off on one subject and end up talking about something so far removed you end up wondering how you ended up there in the first place !.
this thread goes something like why so many 4x4's ah they use a lot of fuel, no they dont yes they do, what about lorries then, yes they use a lot of fuel too, no they dont yes they do, all freight should be on the train, no it should not yes it should, whats this conversation got to do with 4x4's, well i will explain no you wont yes i will and so on and so on.
this thread goes something like why so many 4x4's ah they use a lot of fuel, no they dont yes they do, what about lorries then, yes they use a lot of fuel too, no they dont yes they do, all freight should be on the train, no it should not yes it should, whats this conversation got to do with 4x4's, well i will explain no you wont yes i will and so on and so on.
This one is quite interesting ,now moved on to train v lorrie.I can remember as far back as 25 years, as an apprentise,the likes of toleman and silcock express using frieght trains to move cars,but they still needed transporters at the other end.That was 25 years ago,and besides stobart,who incidently has the tesco food contract,and the usual rail users,who has actually moved over to rail?
Then we get to emmisions,so how do you describe an HST.Well here goes.Currently under a re-engine programme.Why?Well when you are using 50 gallon of engine oil over 24hrs it becomes a bit excessive.So remove the Paxman valentas and fit Mtu Detriots.The rail service is at best questionable,bit of a hard frost,leaves on the rail, or what ever the fleet is parked up.What about time keeping.
Then we get to emmisions,so how do you describe an HST.Well here goes.Currently under a re-engine programme.Why?Well when you are using 50 gallon of engine oil over 24hrs it becomes a bit excessive.So remove the Paxman valentas and fit Mtu Detriots.The rail service is at best questionable,bit of a hard frost,leaves on the rail, or what ever the fleet is parked up.What about time keeping.
DD read my earlier post.Dustydog said:Please will someone tell me why we are going to spend £17. 4 billion on a new railway between London and Birmingham?
Absolutely bonkers and imo a complete and utter waste of tax payers hard earned cash!
Will it reduce HGV traffic? I doubt it.
I know which I would rather have between a new dual track railway line or a new 6 lane motorway to carry the nations goods. The problem is it doesn't stop at 6 lanes because there's the central reservation and hard shoulders, enough room to lay 9 railway tracks.
Something has to give due to our rising population. There as to be enough land to accommodate three cities the size of Nottingham so if it isn't railways, which when electrified are more environmentally friendly and quieter, it has to be pollutant choking motorways which need four times more land than rail. The noise factor is another. Electric trains are much quieter than the constant noise of lorries on a motorway.
No doubt the NIMBYs were about in the 1820s when railways were taking over from canals but imagine where the country would be if those NIMBYs had got their own way. This country wouldn't have led the industrial revolution or sent engineers all over the world building their railways. In those days the NIMBYs were mainly the landed gentry. Some were actually successful in stopping the railway builders going across their land. Some were more generous but with provisions. The railway company had to make a tunnel rather than a cutting, build castellations at the tunnel mouths or have their own private station built with trains stopping on request.
You ask will it stop HGV traffic. In my opinion it will and for more than one reason. The oil situation and how we are now more reliant on other nations who aren't actually friendly towards us. Another reason is we no longer govern ourselves and Brussels dictats are demanding we cut our emissions and if not we get fined. All of our cabinet politicians have the backbones of jellyfish so will comply with the despots. Don't forget, the line isn't just going to Birmingham.
seth said:
I can't comment on the modern traction scene but what I can comment on from experience is in my time we certainly didn't have leaves on the line problems. The simple reason for that is then there were no trees growing alongside the lines because lengthmen (Permanent Way) either chopped them down or got rid of them through controlled burning. Seedlings barely germinated. Again because of the lengthmen frozen points were hardly a problem and I worked on the footplate through the 62/63 winter. Frost on the lines? We never heard of that. If a loco slipped we used the sanders, whether that was on a steam loco or the early diesels like Hymeks, Westerns or Brush Sulzers.
Timekeeping? Well in my day timekeeping was not as good as it is today. Probably because rail traffic was ten times more than it is today. Also todays train companies get fined for lateness.
What you didn't mention was the wrong kind of snow. This has always puzzled me although I understand it to mean the fine powdery snow getting in the traction motors. I'm sure that in my time we had this same kind of snow but I don't recall trains failing because of this. Diesels did fail and were often towed by steam locos, much to the delight of train spotters but this was because faulty steam heating boilers, like the Spanner, or hydraulic problems.
Now then where was I?
Oh yes, I mean no, I didn't get a 4x4 to increase the imaginary size of my
In my younge days I had a Mk1 Escort with a 3.5 litre rover engine and a TR4 with a 4litre engine, a 3 litre Crayford Cortina and some really dodgy wrecks then some pretty boring family cars.
I drive a 4x4 because I like them and I'm far happier in one than in any train
Why would anybody drive a Picasso or a Honda Civic?
Please leave me and others to make our own car selections, I'm getting old and just want to enjoy myself. My car helps me do that despite the moaners and groaners and meddling politicians.
I drive a 4x4 because I like them and I'm far happier in one than in any train
Why would anybody drive a Picasso or a Honda Civic?
I see we have now moved on from 4x4's to 8x8s and 12x12 with upto 4000Hp on tap!
Must be a ve-------ry big caravan!
Must be a ve-------ry big caravan!
OmOnWeelz said:Why would anybody drive a Picasso or a Honda Civic?.
good question?
"Joke honest"
I get it now, the suggestion is that we should tow our caravans on the rail network. Well, that puts an end to the problem of instability and snaking once and for all. And disused marshalling yards could be used as campsites. Great.
in the dim dark recesses of my mind i vaguely recall adverts by British Rail for car trains that would take cars , lorries, caravans from various stations to the south coast and the ports.
There is the Motor Rail service operated in Europe, and of course Eurotunnel.
Just imagine turning up at your local train station in Leeds, drive on to a train and hop off 2 days later in Dover ( it broke down, wrong snow, hijacked, strike action, rails buckled, engineering works, signal wires knicked, train never turned up at Leeds
)
If the price was right i would certainly consider it.
There is the Motor Rail service operated in Europe, and of course Eurotunnel.
Just imagine turning up at your local train station in Leeds, drive on to a train and hop off 2 days later in Dover ( it broke down, wrong snow, hijacked, strike action, rails buckled, engineering works, signal wires knicked, train never turned up at Leeds
If the price was right i would certainly consider it.
But, LB, I'm expecting a delivery this afternoon, and the train won't fit up our lane! Besides which, there's no lines for it to run on. Will they lay them specially for my delivery?Lord Braykewynde said:emmerson said:
4x4s = pollution = lorries
minus lorries + rail locos = pleasanter environment
Oh, and BTW, there's a three ton limit on my bridge, so we only have little lorries up here. Do you have any little trains?
emmerson said:Oh, and BTW, there's a three ton limit on my bridge, so we only have little lorries up here. Do you have any little trains?
As good as done, I'm on to the Welsh Highland as I type.
No problem they tell me. They have built the line from Caernavon and are now on the outskirts of Porthmadog. They have assured me that it's in their plans to reach Newport. The track will pass just below the Blorenge so I've asked them to build a station just for you with an access road to load your caravan on to the train. They've promised to look into this but did say it would take a few years to build that far. When I told him to hurry because of your age he said to keep your fingers crossed and just keep breathing
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