"NM" wrote in message
...
wrote:
What about the vast majority of the time when they are undercut by an
industry working within the law using well maintained lorries (as any
successful haulier needs to do to remain in business). If rail was so
good then the business would flow it's way
... well safety never was a good selling point.
but in spite of massive
subsidies rail doen't even enter the picture,
... no subsidy for railfreight.
possibly 1950's mentality,
lack of flexability and **** poor customer satisfaction can be the root
causes of their ineptitude.
... maybe a complete highway network provided at a cost way beyond
anything HGV taxes run to has something to do with it.
Utter bollox. I await the day all the road generated taxes are actually
spent on the road network,
Perhaps you should look at the cost of building the motorway and trunk road
network and the revenue from vehicles that were on the road at the time.
if this ever occured we would have a system second to none, instead the
surplus is frittered away on bottomless pits like the national trainset.
Although railfreight has been growing for the last ten years mainly
due to the failure of the road system to deliver reliability. ASDA,
Morrisons, Tesco and Sainsburys have been turning to rail increasingly
for the long stuff.
Dream on, they send a tiny amount by rail for the PR value. The
reliability of the road system is not an issue especially now with "just
in time" delivery systems. Been working for decades and improving with
time.
In fact, the only major loss of custom has been the Post Office even
then not to road but air. Mind you we all know, judging by the balance
sheet, that Post Office management have been well away on the funny
stuff for some time now.
I agree with the last bit, any business that has a permanant queue of
customers as long as it's open then still can't make a profit is doing
something badly wrong. The loss to air carriers is just failure to adapt,
bit like the railways really.
Say he, still putting his faith in a vehicle that hasn't changed
substantially for eighty or so years.