Brown goes green?

I always thought that LPG was less harmful to the environment than petrol and diesel.

Mike M

miley snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

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miley_bob
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On Fri, 24 Mar 2006 21:11:19 -0000, "Mark_Howard" finished tucking into their plate of fish, chips and mushy peas. Wiping their mouths, they swiggged the last of their cup of tea, paid the bill and wrote::

There is, you know.......... put freight back where it belongs - on the railways! No lorries on the road - less destruction of the roads, less congestion..............

Brian L Dominic

Web Sites: Canals:

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of the Cromford Canal:
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(Waterways World Site of the Month, November 2005)

Newsgroup readers should note that the reply-to address is NOT read: To email me, please send to brian(dot)dominic(at)tiscali(dot)co(dot)uk

Reply to
Brian Dominic

Come in to the real world, Brian. The reason the railways lost the business in the first place is that they couldn't cope with the distribution side of the business. Moving bulk loads is what the railways are good at, not trying to do just in time deliveries to factories and supermarkets, which is what 75% of the road traffic is today.

The other problem is capacity. The present rail system is pretty much full up during normal working hours, and you'd soon get protests from people living alongside depots and sidings if working were to continue through the night.

I don't have any quick answers, but moving traffic back onto the railways isn't going to happen without a huge expansion of rail facilities. Most of the land and trackside warehousing has gone, sold off by Railtrack, and you'd end up with fleets of trucks operating out of town-centre locations, not the most people-friendly solution.

Places with large marshalling yards still working, like Toton, have no local road networks capable of handling the truck traffic. Sandiacre already suffers from bad congestion in the centre where the road crosses the local canal and there is a five-way junction, and that is without any extra traffic.

Same at Wellingborough, Bedford and even Luton, which had two lots of railway operators serving the station years ago.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk Web:

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Reply to
Peter A Forbes

Yep, and with a dash of modern automation to handle not only standard containers but also smaller modules the system could be made very efficient, but there's no political will unfortunately because railways mean strong unions and challenges to those with the power, that's why we don't have a coal industry either.

Greg

Reply to
Greg

Snip

There is a case here in Warrington where a large warehouse was allowed in the town center as they said the I/C goods would be rail delivered. They were even given a grant to the rail laying cost. All that happened was that for 5 years one train load of Italian tomato's was delivered a year. Once the 5 years they were tied to, expired the track was shut down.

Reply to
Dave Croft

Well they did cope, back before the politicians closed all the lines that they used for that distribution, and with modern automation they could again if the lines were there. Greg

Reply to
Greg

Greg:

That was back in the 1950's, when a week to deliver something was acceptable and the old Scammell 3-wheelers were a regular sight on the streets.

Just look at the ASDA and Argos operations for a minute. They both have adjacent warehouses at Bedford on the A421. They run 24-hour trucking operations out of there to service the main stores in the region, plus you have deliveries coming in from the suppliers.

I reckon there are probably 200 or more truck runs a day at least, probably more out of those two depots, and they are only there because of the M1 access and the coming dualling of the A421.

Another very large warehouse exists on the new Rushden bypass, just opened and I don't know who operates it, but it is a seriously large place. Add to that the places at Rugby, Nuneaton, Daventry, Northampton and so on.

You just couldn't replicate that with rail operations, it is too fast for rail, and that's what people want. Goods tied up in shipping are no good to the suppliers or the retailer. To produce an automated railfreight system would cost billions and wouldn't get off the ground as there is no background or existing system to copy, except airfreight and the costs involved there are also very high.

IF Beeching hadn't been allowed to cut all the branch lines and IF someone had the foresight to see the coming traffic boom, then there may have been a chance to do something, but the investment in road transport has gone too far to put the Genie back in the bottle.

We are involved with the railways and not at all in road transport, and I would dearly love to see a revival of the rail industry, but I have to say that the poeple running it at Government level haven't a clue.

Peter

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk Web:

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Reply to
Peter A Forbes

There lies most of the problem. The reason Beeching was allowed to cut the number of branch lines was because of the financial view of the operations of road and rail. Roads have always been touted as an investment whereas they really are a subsidy. On the other hand, railways have always been classed as a subsidy when they really are an investment. Once we get politicians and accountants to realize that fact then we may begin to see moves to re-establish freight on rail at a decent level again.

At Culham I see regular bulk movements of freight going through while waiting for my passenger service to get me home. These trains are often 100 wagons long, full length containers mostly, and that is 100 road vehicles not causing pollution for the distance these containers are moved.

Let's hope that their viewpoint can be reversed sooner rather than later. I suspect it is going to take a great deal of lobbying.

Reply to
Paul E. Bennett

Whilst I wholly agree with the concept of getting freight back onto the railways the one thing I find hard to tolerate is that it seems to be the freight trains that wreck the catenaries' and track on our local line and kill the commuter traffic (of which I am unfortunately one) stone dead. Our wonderful Network Rail operation need to get geared up to handle any additional freight traffic. Another major investment opportunity that undoubtedly won't happen.

Mark

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Reply to
Mark_Howard

Would have thought John "Guy Fawkes" Bunt would have been too busy thinking of where he might find =A340K to cover the costs of a failed attempt at fraud, to have the time to post in regard to this sort of matter?

k

Guy Fawkes wrote:

Reply to
Ken

It seems to me that the real problem is that there is no will for expansion (or even development) in the rail network. The track is old, the infra-structure archaic and much of the rolling stock is kept going by fire-fighting techniques that would have made IKB look very nervous!

Sad to say, unless there is a huge rise in the public's will to pay for it, the railways in this country will remain a backwater, as sidelined as the canals with the rise of rail and steam power when the IC engine became a worthwhile proposition.

It is hard for us to step far enough back to see it, but we are still part of the Industrial Revolution. Until there is a step change in energy generation by the invention of something like cheap fusion or some other as yet undiscovered process, we shall all have to manage as best we can. I just hope we manage to figure it out before the oil runs out!

That said, there is a lot of coal left beneath our feet that might just come in handy towards the end of this century ........

Regards,

Kim Siddorn

Reply to
Kim Siddorn

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may provide a bit of leeway..

Tom

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Tom

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