Great Western Coffee Shop

Another 4400 tons of Somerset heading East this afternoon !! The loco sounded to be working very hard. (Photo taken from Westbury White Horse.)

(https://i.postimg.cc/kG394N9f/JWN01710-ARW-Dx-O-Deep-PRIME.jpg) (https://postimg.cc/620Fbv8v)

Imagine that lot on the roads ! pollution, road congestion, and the number of HGV drivers needed.

There can't be many hills left in  Somerset. Is this what they call "levelling up"?

Very impressive and got me thinking that some UK businesses could make much greater use than currently of rail in their supply chains; this seems to be particularly true of the supermarkets who as far as I am aware are, with the exception of Tesco, completely wedded to road transport, and also Royal Mail who presently run a significant overnight distribution network centred on EMA (East Midlands Airport).

Incidentally yesterday's early morning postal flight back to Exeter returned to EMA without touching terra firma due to our local airport being fogbound. A train would not have been affected.

Also just to the east of Exeter (Clyst Honiton) there is the massive Lidl regional distribution depot. This was actually built at the behest of Sainsburys and should have been rail connected - the WoE line is in their back garden - but I understand they gave it up partly because the local authority were insisting that the rail delivery proposal was implemented.

Watching all the stone coming off the branch at Witham, and heading east, in the mid 1970s made me think back then "how much can there be left?"  A staff jolly type visit by DMU to the quarry revealed how big the hole was, back then.

And it's still going, near enough half a century later.  Astonishing.  How much of Somerset has gone into Lonodn and other places in all those intervening years.  How much can there be left?

The Lidl distribution depot east of Exeter would not have been built if the original plans for the site had been implemented. I cannot recollect why it wasn't carried through, but the site was originally earmarked for a large railfreight hub. 

....but presumbly not as hard as it would be on the run up to Savernake/Bruce Tunnel!

Here is a link to the only complete, 20-year history of the "Exeter Gateway" fiasco:-

https://www.teignrail.co.uk/political-campaigning.php#prioritytransport

Sainsbury's gave up the site now occupied by Lidl because the fortunes of the Big Four supermarkets suddenly changed, partly because of the German Company's invasion.