Great Western Coffee Shop

This was posted on the WNXX Forum: Bristol FLT is to close with the last train departing on 30 July 2019 following the loss of two signficant contracts. Remaining work is to be transferred to Wentloog.

So much then for reducing Bristol road traffic congestion and pollution...... ::)

I wonder what this means for it's future? Does closure mean for ever or is it just being mothballed? I also suppose it's future depends on who owns the site.

Bit of a minnow, the Bristol terminal. I presume these capacities are measured in TEU (which I now know to be 'Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units'):

Terminal	Location	Total Capacity
Freightliner	Coatbridge	2520
Freightliner	Leeds	1100
Freightliner	Doncaster	800
Freightliner	Manchester	1500
Freightliner	Garston (Liverpool)	1975
Freightliner	Birmingham	1850
Freightliner	Bristol	393
Pentalver	Southampton	8500
Pentalver	London Gateway	3700
Pentalver	Felixstowe	8250

I agree that closing it doesn't on the face of it seem to support a green agenda, though having once spent an hour in the kitchen at a party talking to a logistics manager I recognise that there is more to this kind of thing than is dreamt of in my philosophy...


For some reason Cardiff (Wentloog) doesn't appear on the list I found, but as far as I can see it has a capacity of 1000-3000 TEU.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this.

If there is no, or insufficient, traffic moving through the depot then there is precious little point in keeping it open - it was that sort of malarkey that led to the Beeching Report 56 years ago... ;)

Furthermore, I am not sure what if any impact this will have on road traffic congestion and pollution within Bristol. Containers taken to and from the client already come by road and will continue to do so; only the mature of the journey will change (eg something coming in from Avonmouth now would come on a wagon down the Portway, and in future the same wagon will head off along the M5 and M4).

And then the whole thing moves onto the wider issue of freight transportation in general. Those at the "greener" end of the political spectrum like to promote moving freight by rail to reduce congestion and pollution, but of course when you take into account what happens in the real world as described in the above paragraph, you begin to see that the affect is only likely to be on the motorway and trunk road network, and not on built-up areas at all.

All that said, the UK's record on moving freight by rail is abysmal. When I was talking to a railway employee in Utah a fortnight ago he told me that about 40% of freight in America is moved by rail. I've forgotten the exact figure for the UK but I am guessing it is somewhere around 10%. Why is this? Are most journeys too short to make  rail freight viable? Are the railways charging too much for the service? Are they turning potentially good traffic away?

The WNXX thread suggested that the depot would be taken over by a roadstone business, whether or not the rail connection will still be used I don't know.

As for the environmental impact, well it rather depends on where the containers were coming from/going to. If it was Avonmouth or Portbury docks, then it will be better for Bristol's air quality that they are not being driven through the city.

I suspect that a far better location for a container terminal for the region would be next to the motorway at Avonmouth, but whether there's enough traffic to justify building and operating one is another question. Wasn't the Port of Bristol talking about building a large maritime container terminal?

As for rail freight in the UK, the issue is that most freight travels relatively small distances and few premises are rail connected, so it's simply not competitive on time or cost grounds, apart from bulky commodities like cars, steel or stone, containers from ports to distribution hubs, and the odd piggyback flow like Midlands to Scotland.

Not only that, but its rail connections are one of its claimed advantages.
https://www.bristolport.co.uk/trades/containers/deep-sea-container-terminal

Is this the complex just along from Parson Street station on the way out of Bristol?

Yes - here: https://goo.gl/maps/izU5j18LwpGvJZmR9

Complex is a little OTT for a loop siding, some piled containers and a couple of mobile container cranes.