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Roland Perry · December 9th 19, 04:29 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In message , at 16:41:19 on Mon, 9 Dec
2019, remarked:
On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 11:13:38 +0000
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 09:19:42 on Sun, 8 Dec
2019, remarked:
And don't the local residents know it. I have some relatives who live in a
village near there. 2 years ago it was lovely green fields down the road
from their house , now theres a bloody dual carraigeway with all the
accompanying noise and pollution they'll soon have to enjoy to follow on from
all the construction work. All so trucks can save 10 mins on their way from
Felixstow instead of putting the containers on trains where they should be.

Nobody cares how much the time the trucks save, it's mainly for the cars
caught up in jams along with other cars. There's negligible HGV
container traffic on that flow anyway, it's one of the enduring local
urban myths.

Whatever the governmental reason for it, no one in the area wanted the damn
bypass. Its just more countryside carved up and more farmland disappeared under
concrete to make a few minutes savings in journey times.

Clearly you don't actually understand the problem, which is daily
traffic jams of half an hour or more.

Of course people buying into that urban myth were recently joined by the
majority describing the truck full of deceased vietnamese migrants as a
"refrigerated container", when it's nothing of the sort. It's a trailer,
and we don't put those onto trains.

Only because of our daft loading gauge. They do it in other countries.

How many of the trailers arrive on our shores at container ports. None I
think you'll find. Therefore even if the loading gauge was higher a
Corbynistic hundred billion pound upgrade I suspect), there's no demand.

Meanwhile the container trains trundling through the Fens parallel to
the A14 are very rarely full (and frequently almost completely empty),
so there's plenty of spare capacity.

Which should be used. If companies don't want to use it then slap a massive
tax on every truck coming out of the port with a container which is going to
a destination that could be reached part or whole of the way by rail.

There are very few such containers, because they are already travelling
by rail if at all possible. Apart from anything else it's vastly
cheaper.
--
Roland Perry