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Old October 22nd 19, 05:08 PM posted to uk.transport.london,uk.railway
Recliner[_4_] Recliner[_4_] is offline
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Default Orion 769 Flex cargo services into Liverpool St

Marland wrote:
tim... wrote:


"Recliner" wrote in message
...
Graeme Wall wrote:
On 22/10/2019 11:35, tim... wrote:


"Recliner" wrote in message
...
From:

https://www.ft.com/content/c2b51fd2-f19f-11e9-ad1e-4367d8281195?segmentId=080b04f5-af92-ae6f-0513-095d44fb3577



One of the Britain’s busiest railway stations is set to take on a new
role
as a freight hub as part of a plan to shuttle goods to central London
from
a container port using old passenger trains.


Have I understood this right?

someone is going to take a container of stuff from the port

transfer the contents of it onto a converted passenger carriage
individual "units" at a time, presumably through side door(s)

and then at the other end empty the passenger carriage by individual
units onto little trucks

Actually into vans


What size of individual unit is this going to work for?


Pallets and wheeled cages, think updated BRUTES.

Somehow it reminds me of one of the late Michael Bell's schemes

His scheme involved autonomous, self-propelled containers being carried on
the convertible upper deck of his giant high speed double-decker trains.
They would drive themselves right to the cutomer's address.


you might jest, but I feel sure that Amazon are looking at doing that sort
of thing without the train involvement

tim





The Ocado depot in Andover Hampshire burnt down early this possibly because
the fire precautions were not thought through enough, that withstanding the
publicity from the incident did show how far the technology of
autonomous sorting equipment has become and similar equipment is used
elsewhere.
video of the Ocado system here, it would not be inconceivable to think that
some of the units could be programmed to load themselves onto a truck or
train get taken to distribution point and once self driving vehicle
technology has developed complete the last leg though I imagine at first it
would be other warehouses.

Ocado before it burnt.

https://youtu.be/4DKrcpa8Z_E


Automated robots following tracks in flat factory floors aren't new, and
the Ocado ones run in a segregated environment where they don't have to
steer clear of people or other vehicles. Extrapolating that to the general
problem of operating in a public space, where they have to self-navigate
around people and other vehicles, across curbs and bumpy surfaces, obeying
traffic lights, etc is a difficult problem whose solution isn't imminent.
Level 5 autonomous cars are certainly more than a decade away, perhaps much
more.