Freight off road onto rail - corollaries

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From the Basingstoke Gazette

New trains will take up to 120 lorries a week off the roads

DP World trains from Southampton to London Gateway will cut lorry use

A NEW freight rail service between Southampton and Essex is part of an effort to take 300,000 trucks of the roads each year.

Port terminal operator DP World is running the trains between its Southampton and London Gateway in Thurrock.

It says the intermodal rail service will boost the resilience of supply chains and allow customers to switch volumes quickly and easily between the locations.

Good. 

Thought. Does the movement of freight from road to rail, with fewer drivers needed to move all the goods, help release drivers of heavy road vehicles to take new roles filling other shortages in drivers of other freight and passenger vehicles (i.e. buses)

Thought. With the driver of each train moving so much more than the driver of an HGV, shoud (s)he be paid in proportion to the amount of freight moved?

[stuving]

What struck me as odd is that it's not going very far - less than 150 km on the map. And if London is the main target for onward distribution of containers, it's still 40 km from London Gateway - a reduction from the 120 km for Southampton, but hardly worth it at the cost of an extra transshipment. 

For wider area on the south and west of London it doesn't really help, though for the north and east it does avoid wider greater London. But I'm sure containers are loaded onto these trains according to their final destination and the exact route planned for them, so it should make sense.

[Bmblbzzz]

It's going from one port to another, overland, which does seem odd. Maybe it's to do with lack of trans-shipment capacity at one end, eg lack of staff in Essex or lack of space in Southampton? But obviously the trains will be going in both directions so presumably the containers will too. It seems like good news in any case.

Ed: Looking at the website for London World, I see they have trains from there to Avonmouth already – so port to port rail movements are 'a thing' anyway. https://www.dpworld.com/london-gateway/port/rail-schedule
For Southampton it just says "22 trains a day to key inland destinations" https://www.dpworld.com/southampton/port-info/terminal-info

[Noggin]

From the Basingstoke Gazette

(Snip...)

Thought. Does the movement of freight from road to rail, with fewer drivers needed to move all the goods, help release drivers of heavy road vehicles to take new roles filling other shortages in drivers of other freight and passenger vehicles (i.e. buses)

Assuming that it replaces existing truck flows then indeed, it should free up HGV drivers.

Of course new rail freight flows will need drivers, for which there's a relatively limited pool.

I'd suggest that HGV and PSV drivers are probably not interchangeable.

In a similar vein it occurred to me this week after seeing very full trains in Bristol due to bus cancellations and unreliability that although we think of road capacity as the main constraint on transport, perhaps we ought to think of driver labour, which skews towards trains and trams. .

[Bmblbzzz]

In a similar vein it occurred to me this week after seeing very full trains in Bristol due to bus cancellations and unreliability that although we think of road capacity as the main constraint on transport, perhaps we ought to think of driver labour, which skews towards trains and trams. .

You can be sure that at least some of the interest in autonomous vehicles, both on road and rail, is due to this. As far as I know, the only fully autonomous commercial services running so far are a freight line in Australia, taxis in San Francisco, and DLR^▸ (Docklands Light Railway) and tube, if we count those (they do still have a human ready to take control, so not truly autonomous in the way eg the SF taxis are). I expect I've missed a few but it's probably quite a time till we see driverless lorries and buses on the roads.