Here's the original that I posted on
WNXX▸ cut from the FT:
The train is promising to take the strain of some of the booming market in ecommerce deliveries after a rail freight operators revealed plans to use old Intercity 125 trains to whisk parcels from Yorkshire to north London.
GB▸ Railfreight plans to start offering the service between Doncaster and a site in north London from early 2018, in the hope it will revolutionise how goods are distributed in London. Same-day deliveries are currently almost entirely handled by trucks and vans.
Duncan Clark, GB Railfreight’s director of strategic development, revealed the plans at the annual conference of the Rail Delivery Group, the train operators’ trade body. He presented the service as a way for businesses to offer same-day deliveries in London without incurring the expense of building a full distribution centre in an area where land and labour are both expensive and scarce.
The project would use some of the 125mph Intercity 125 trains built in the 1970s by British Rail after they are withdrawn from passenger service. It would be the first time a UK▸ railfreight operator has offered a 125mph service and a return to the UK market of dedicated, high-speed parcel trains.
Mr Clark said the idea was to strip out the trains’ seats and load the packages into the spaces. The trains would carry north packages that had arrived at Heathrow airport and other points around London.
“You should be loading in both directions,” Mr Clark said.
Each train would be able to handle the same volume of packages as six trucks, Mr Clark said.
GB Railfreight had an agreement with Doddle, an internet delivery service, Mr Clark said.
Tim Robinson, Doddle’s chief executive, confirmed the company had been working with GB Railfreight on the potential opportunity to use the railways to provide retailers with “cost-effective, same-day delivery” of ecommerce orders into central London via its network of “click-and-collect” stores.
GB Railfreight also had a tentative deal with Asos, an online fashion retailer, to participate in the trial, Mr Clark said. Asos did not immediately respond to requests to comment.
Mr Clark said the Intercity 125 trains were ideal because they would be cheap to lease and extremely reliable.
Mr Clark did not say which terminal in London the service would use. Many sites once used for freight in London have been closed and turned over to other uses.
The operator planned to launch its service in early 2018 because of the challenges of obtaining the trains, Mr Clark said. Many Intercity 125s are still in service but are due to be replaced by new Intercity Express trains being built by Hitachi.
“We have to secure the rolling stock, otherwise we could go now,” Mr Clark said.
Julian Worth, chairman of the rail freight forum of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, said GB Railfreight’s idea was interesting.
“There’s certainly money to be made out of the premium market,” Mr Worth said. “It’s even more the case these days with the growth of internet deliveries and multichannel retailing.”
Mr Worth predicted that, provided GB Railfreight’s experiment was a success, it could pave the way for wider use of fast rail services to deliver goods into London.
What it doesn't mention is that Doddle is a joint venture between Network Rail and the founder of Travelex. So conceivably it could be planning to make use of the infrastructure built for Royal Mail where it is still in existence.
I'd wondered why they were bothering to wait for
HST▸ 's when other loco-hauled stock and
EMU▸ stock are available, but using 125's may well enable them to get paths using the working day rather than at night, as well as being good for publicity. They are of course also less prone to failure by virtue of two power cars and are cleared for most major routes apart from in 3rd rail land.
Seems strange that they are only the equivalent of 6 lorries, but someone on WNXX also pointed out that the former Royal Mail 325 EMU's had reinforced floors, so it may well be that they won't be filled to capacity.
