Great video. I can give a few examples of the problems we face in the UK. In the 1970's the company my dad worked for were big rail users. They had trucks to run down to the rail head and then would send cloth across Europe by train, which they were happy with. One day there was a wildcat strike, followed then by another sequence of strikes on the railways. Orders, whilst met on the production side were sat in rail wagons not going anywhere. That cost them money and contracts (especially export work to German companies) The managing director and transport manager literally went out and bought a new fleet of trucks overnight. Within a month, the trucks and infrastructure were inplace, and they never used rail again. When British Rail finally realised that they had no traffic they came to ask what the situation was: shown some of the truck fleet they left. Whilst I would never criticise another person's right to withdraw their labour, until people can depend on the service, road haulage will always come out on top, as you control it [road haulage]. I spend time in Switzerland where small factories still have rail sidings that are used, and the railways are responsive to small loads, and by-and-large there's a service that runs day-in-day-out for the benefit of its customers. I look on at Swiss rail yards enviously, wishing we could operate like that.
Once gone from rail to road there is little need to go back. Majority of the rail traffic today is long distance intermodals and then minerals. A typical business will now use a postal service operator, rent or operate a fleet of vans or trucks which can go from source to destination with very little hassle. Some cases the business like Amazon are running battery vans. Difficult for the railways to compete unless it is massive bulk quantities. Even in a large country like the USA the restrictions of small and bulk quantities apply. It is often cheaper to send a container via truck across the USA than use rail.
'Whilst I would never criticise another person's right to withdraw their labour, until people can depend on the service, road haulage will always come out on top, as you control it [road haulage].' Basically you do want the right to withdraw their labour banned don't you?
@@rodneyhull9764 that wasn't implied at all. Stop being disingenuous. It's merely pointing out that if a more reliable alternative exists at a similar price point then the unreliable service will lose out. The Communications Workers Union is in the process of finding this out at the moment with the postal strikes. People forget that the minimum wage is zero because you don't get paid at all if you don't have a job.
@@rodneyhull9764 No Rodney, each to their own. What I am saying is that in a society where your part of that process is reliant on others fulfilling their part of the contract, what do you do if they have a dispute between their employer and themselves and are bringing you into it? In my dad's companies situation they removed British Rail from the process. As this documentary pointed out the same thing happened in the 1950's with companies. As I say, if people want to strike carry on: no ban from me.
@@johnclarke2997 And I think that's the sad part John. The Swiss have a very good small load cargo system that holds its own against road, and indeed makes places far better for it. As a user of that service, you need to know, rather like with road transport, if you send it, it will arrive on, or near time. It's such a shame we can't do that in the UK in the same way.
I was at Bescot Yard in the 70s and watched the decline of the old wagonload network and the gradual growth of the airbrake network, (Speelink). Every night the a/b trains would come in, with sections on them, and we would shunt the sections around and remarshal the trains for departure in a separate set of sidings, the wagons never went over the hump. Later on when I was at the British Railways Board, we investigated the operation of Willesden, where Speedlink trains were marshalled, and it became obvious why it was so difficult to make economies. Essentially the yard had to be resourced to handle the planned traffic every day, but this traffic varied; customers didn't always dispatch traffic, yet expected BR to always be in a position to accept it, so on most days there was a waste of resources. So local management were tempted to reduce resources, and then on the days when traffic was at its maximum, delays occurred and wagons missed their connecting service. Making a wagonload service pay is next to impossible in my opinion, and single consignments are better handled in containers and transported on timetabled intermodal trains. Essentially this is what now happens in the UK, except that intra-UK intermodal is almost non-existent, it is all to/from the ports such as Felixstowe and Southampton.
You make a very good point about marshalling yard resourcing, because shunting is very people-intensive. But I think we've managed to lose our intermodal freight to the roads as well. A fundamental economic problem is that the railways need to pay for their infrastructure, whereas freight hauliers don't - all the latter need to do is complain, and the government (i.e. the taxpayers) build more roads. When the railways complained they were unprofitable, governments shut them down, rather than investing.
They did try to get customers to switch to container services but in the main these attempts ended in failure. The only domestic container services that I know of and that were successful were the Derwenthaugh to Wakefield coke services and the potash/rock salt services from Boulby, one of which went down to ICI Severnside with potash for turning into fertilizer. Both were operated by Cobra Containers. These only lasted a few years with the coke containers being used for the rock saltbaftervthe coke traffic ended. They even built a few inland container terminals for domestic services, one of these was at Nottingham and was an early closure victim.
Love these videos and the classic footage. A lot of interesting and often poorly made choices along the way, the best thing about UK freight is that the rails are owned by a government entity unlike in N America where private freight companies have throttled passenger opportunities. It's not perfect by a long shot, but as a ViA passenger on 50 year old stock on rickety 90 mile hour track I can tell you guys in UK have it good,
Another great video bro and/or audio seems better this week. Well Done! Although, walking through the history of the railways in Britain at this time is a bit depressing as so many mistakes were made.
@@LuckyFlanker13 Am not British but yeah I get it. Though, new Acela trains looks sexy and may go up to 165 so great if you've there, not so much if you're in WY or SD. And then there's California's High Speed... yeah ok, I take your point.
It’s not surprising that BR is gone… it must have cost a fortune with all these branding, and grouping changes which meant locos were repainted in the colour scheme for each group.
British Rail had one livery for almost 20 years. The HST had two liveries between 1976 and the mid '90s. How many liveries has the average HST had since then? The InterCity East Coast franchise alone resulted in five different liveries.
Great informative video. Whilst I enjoy your videos on railways and cars, I find myself engaged watching your videos on things like airplanes and airlines which I previously would not seek out. Thank you for your videos
That is fascinating and shows the corruption or incompetence of beeching. He kept one of the most unprofitable sectors of the railways almost intact, not just changing the system which alone would have lowered the debt incurred by 40 million and as proved by lorries and later on make a huge profit. But instead kept it, while destroying railways in general that just needed investment like the Japanese did at the same time.
It was Ermest Marples who sacrificed rail freight for his own self enrichment. I am amazed how the UK's economy doesn't collapse with the kleptocracy we are lumped with
Your railway stuff is the best, Rory. Thanks for producing these videos. Reminds me of watching them shunt wagons in the sidings near my house as a kid, 40-odd years ago. Looks like the ECML at the end there as well.
The report on Speedlink did say 10 wagons per day over 500 miles, but you left out 1 crucial part and that this was for EACH customer using the service. This they said would cover all costs. Around 70% of the costs of providing this service were tied up in the marshalling, remarshalling on route and the local group workings which had to be provisioned for for each day they ran irrespective of there being any work. BR approached 30,000 firms offering their services, very few responded, and even if BR had ta,en on this work it would have only hastened Speedlink's demise. They also looked at ways of cutting costs and worked out that if they could cut the network and if they could make savings of around 40% then only 15% of the Speedlink flows would be profitable. At the time of closure Speedlink accounted for only 2.3% of the freight volume carried by BR (or about 0.12% of all freight volume in the UK). By the time of Speedlink's demise there were over 220 individual destinations being served.
Excellent video, although sad to hear about how a great national rail freight service was handicapped by government and economic situations over the decades. My dad was a BR freight guard in the Western Region during the 80’s and 90’s, he loved the work but hated the politics…
I will always be jealous of the electric freight the UK has. My state was actually heading in that direction (for short context my state is bigger than the UK (gotta love Australia) when we had electric container trains, electric sleeper trains and even electric cattle trains. Then we started to electrify the Central Queensland Coal fields and a lot of our electric locomotives were moved to fill those roles and were supposed to be returned once newer locomotives were purchased to resume electric freight around the city of Brisbane. Then the states rail freight started expending nation wide and *then* was privatised with the entire electric loco fleet taken up by the now private company meaning they never returned to haul electric freight in the city with the old electric locos scrapped once new ones came in.
It's that old neoliberal fallacy of "the service must be profitable itself", which neglects to take a step back and look at all the profitable businesses a service supports. No sane person considers utilities like water and electricity to be "individually profitable", as they support society and the economy as a whole. It's utter madness to think that somehow you can make any money out of a public service without robbing everyone else in the process. Unless you and your chums would stand to benefit from that, of course...
@@86pp73 And its the socialist fallacy that the Government can do things more efficiently than the private man and at a lower cost. The decline of railfreight in the UK is a direct cause of Government intervention in the economy, especially in the transport sector with the government defacto subsidising road transport by building massive toll-free motorways (that would inevitably compete with rail) and placing unfair regulations on the rail industry that the road industry doesn't (and shouldn't) have to comply with. If the government had been seperated from the economy over a century ago then I'd bet that the UK would have a booming railfreight industry and the UK National Debt would be nowhere near £3trillion pounds (Excl. unfunded liabilities), a figure HM Government currently holds and counting.
@@wclifton968gameplaystutorials Ironically, the government building so many roads and gutting the railways was because they were taking fat backhanders from automotive manufacturers and the road haulage industry. Despite what Ayn Rand may have told you, the private sector will only do whatever makes it money, and predominantly in the short-term. If putting babies in blenders is what turns a profit, then the private sector will invest in the means of securing more blenders and more babies. Doesn't matter if that's a totally nonsensical thing to do, or how much it hurts us all in the long-run, the market will follow whatever makes them money right now. The brutal truth is any man can be made a fool by the promise of wealth and power, regardless if he runs a company or a country.
Great video, many thanks!! Good to see the 1955 modernization plan mentioned here - it's something that isn't scrutinized enough. The costs of those marshalling yards and goods facilities, not to mention the sometimes disastrous diesel locomotive orders was staggering - all for a large proportion of it to be scrapped inside 15 years. What a waste of money. You're also right to highlight the potential for wagonload to make a comeback although I doubt whether it would hit the dizzy heights of the 1980's.
These videos are fantastic but also quite saddening. The constant change of plans and failure to look at the direction of society and technology equates to vast quantities of cash being wasted on vanity projects and marketing. This nonsense continues today so you should be able to continue your pursuit of all things transport right through to retirement. Fantastic content as always.
I love how the euro tunnel class 9s were based off of the brush traction built new Zealand rail ef class. Bloody mint to see a nz class of locomotive basis being used in one of the most highly used sections of European rail even though we have only just recently started to rebuild them ourselves
The near constant strikes and industrial action throughout the 70s and early 80s did nothing to help. A steel plant and quarry near where I live abandoned rail after one strike too many in 1981, and the 2 mile branch they were on was closed. Rail workers were their own worst enemy back then.
I found someone who argued that the introduction of expensive marshalling yards in the Modernisation Plan was actually because BR tried to get rid of wagonload freight but the government refused to budge on the idea of dropping the common carrier legislation. BR were thus forced to build them to make a massively loss-making venture at least a little more efficient, since they saw no way this requirement would be dropped in the foreseeable future. Of course the increased public expense going into the 1960s made the government take the need for such things much more seriously, and this is what led to common carrier regulations being dropped. So the argument goes that it wasn't BR's shortsightedness in the 50s but the government's.
Does anyone remember the Roadrailer experiment? It may have been an American concept but the idea dated from before WWII with interchangeable road/rail wheels on a lorry trailer. It never struck me as a high speed mode of transport when on the rails with a single axle per 'wagon'.
I recall that it goes horribly wrong due to stresses on the bogies, and it's been entirely phased out in favour of trailers that can easily be loaded on to flatbeds and well cars
On the question of strikes, without going in to the details of the disputes mentioned in the video, should it not always be remembered that whenever a strike continues this is not only because the union concerned have decided that it is in their best interests not to return to work, but also that the employer has decided that they too can afford to allow the strike to run on. Surely it goes without saying that the facts of each individual dispute are different, and it should not be assumed that in every case it is the striking employees who are being unreasonable by not giving-in first. Seen in this light then of course the responsibility for the decline of rail traffic, and many other industies, should perhaps be shared by both 'sides' of industry.
Sounds and looks a lot like Victorian and Australian freight in general - an absolute mess which saw the trucking industry walk in and take over almost completely.
Wow, I had no idea British rail freight was such a basket case! I guess the fact that freight is king in North America is something I just take for granted.
This is excellent. It would be Interesting to know - what railways around the world were quick to embrace containerisation? (I have the impression that even the US railroads were slow though they did have piggyback trains as early as the 1950s) - how the smaller loading gauge in Britain affected this - what other railways persisted in wagon load freight? - is there/what is the hidden subsidy going to road freight for lorries not paying the full cost of the damage to the roads they exact?
It’s always mentioned this idea of making a loss or being over budget. Nationalised railways don’t have to make a profit; especially not in the short term, and the government could easily have funded it properly. But they decided to run it down and privatise it. The idea that the government just didn’t have the money to electrify it fully in the 50s and 60s is obviously ridiculous. They just decided trains were irrelevant once they started building motorways, and that was that. Throw trains on the scrap heap with bicycles was the mentality. And why couldn’t you put minimum prices on the road freight too? It’s the same thing that was going on in the states.
Very interesting to put it mildly. A catalogue of political interference and incompetence… oh hang on, that’s today. It is sad. On a brighter note, great video and content, thank you.
Interesting information, though some omissions... examples, prior to Speedlink, the network was known as: ABN AIR BRAKED NETWORK, and for example, RFD European was marketed as CONNECTRAIL ...
The Freightliner depot off Harry Lauder Road in Edinburgh is still there, still with one of its two cranes, but it's overgrown and mostly turned over to light industry and storage of railway sleepers and gravel and so on.
You have a very negative view of unions, it’s a good job we still have them or this country would be back in the Victorian era for the working population.
I have heard about Speedlink. But weren’t they very reliable and very useful. Apologies for deleting my other comment because there are scammers about and RU-vid is doing nothing about it except reporting scammers.
The problem is, the environmentalists have got their heads too deep into the folly of electric trucks, to realize a solution already exists, called railways.
The environment discussion is so useless. Road or track, if you still use stinky diesel power, that really makes zero difference. Who cares. Your stench goes off shore anyway.
Stop glossing over the facts to put your own spin on things and getting it wrong. The dieselisation process was hurried because of external factors, the most important of which was the Clean Air Act that was passed a short while after the Modernisation Plan had been published. This effectively castrated the BTC's plans for dieselisation and put an end to the idea of testing designs to get the best diesel locomotives. The Modernisation Plan was sound but circumstsnces over took it.
@@Nick-Emery I speak out if I see something is being deliberately misrepresented to score political points. Now if you not got anything adult to say...
One thing left out of the BR matrix,was the British Government's subsidization of the roads,and canals! Add the fact that the rails were required to make a profit, but the competition were not hobbled by that requirement! The same thing occurred in the US,with Amtrak,as that requirement of profit was saddled on passenger services,while the airlines and roadways were subsidized! Simply,where was the equality under the law?? Thatcher and company forgot that there a degree of interdependence,and you have to take an overall view, and not penalize innocent people! And that applies in the US too!! Thank you for your diligence, and filling in the history! The English really need to learn from others, about many things,railroad operations,and what not works!! Thank you 😇!
What struck me watching this was the frequency of restructuring and rebranding of the railways’ various cargo operations. They never seemed to be allowed to get established before another change would be made. If you visit the Rhineland it’s striking how many really long cargo trains operate there. Despite the Channel Tunnel there’s very little cargo work in Britain, and trains are so short.
Absolutely. That and a government that hated railways, unions opposed to any change in work practices (with strikes forcing freight onto the roads) and a lack of long-term investment (because rail was treated in isolation, not part of an integrated system) and no wonder rail freight declined.
@@anotherfreediver3639 your right about the government, but after forty in years in the rail industry I can assure that there were many changes in working practices negotiated with the unions.
Rhineland is also more industrial than UK , plus Switzerland is land locked and much of their needed bulk supplies goes by rail from the North Sea down thru Rhineland . Germany is also a transit country in rail cargo from France and Holland to / from Eastern Europe travels thru . Also Sweden to Italy connection is thru Germany and that alone is almost two trains an hour all day . So Rhineland is a freight railway by convenience compared to UK being an Island and is an unfair comparison .
Thank you for the video. So much effort on rebranding, name changes and different liveries. How did customers keep up with all the changes? All shirt and no trousers, as my father would put it.
How I hate that truth at 18:19 I think that the biggest mistake that we made was losing our industrial and manufacturing sectors in favour of endless coffee shops and creative ways to spend borrowed money... a point very much highlighted when we needed PPE and medical equipment manufactured during Covid and we had to rely on about 13 blokes at a Formula 1 team who had access to some engineering tools and a fashionable clothing label for the PPE... It later turned out that we did have some tiny little companies who could assist but, due to the nature of our service economy and our current government these offers were entirely ignored. People with dirt under their nails are clearly not to be trusted
How sad the cut in the railway network, something similar happened in Argentina thanks to the poor administrative management of the railway, that it passed from English hands to national hands and there began a whole decline until the end of the 20th century, that the branches that once arrived to the towns and transported passengers from one town to another, the service was closed or simply withdrawn and that route was left in a wait that was mostly eternal and in others it directly disappeared!, And that to the railway material that was sold because they said that generated losses, Today it is so decadent and being that it is a system so needed in the region, But it only reaches a very small handful of people, And it arrives badly or with a terrible delay, The infrastructure is maintained as best it can because They do not invest in anything and even so the staff manages to sustain it, with outdated equipment, demanding for these times!, Investments if there are any, it is in renewing the freight wagons, but these have the "s" death" from running on roads in a terrible state, where you spend in derailments, repairs of this material and so on!, Going back to the subject of the video that is excellent and gives a perspective of how those years were, but somehow they managed to refloat in such crisis and managed to make it sustainable in every way, practically enviable haha
Talk about rail freight being a political football. It's a wonder that anything in the sector survived the chopping and changing of their political masters. Thanks for an interesting summing up of the events during that period.
Prior to the introduction of freightliner BR converted part of its fleet of LOWMAC ED wagons into CONFLAT ISO for the carriage of containers. BR tried to get domestic customers to use freightliner services, but failed to generate much interest.
Whilst its mentioned spread of containerisation completely changed ports and railways across the world very quickly. Before, 90% of the cost of shipping something from US to UK was port handling and 10% actual cost of shipping
You make another very good point. I've just finished reading 'The Box' by Marc Levinson, and that was a real eye-opener on costs, and the effect that unions had in forcing change elsewhere (which is why the UK's main container port is in Felixstowe, for example).
I was scared to watch cause of the recent audio issues but you've now nailed it perfectly on this one, PLEASE KEEP THESE AUDIO SETTINGS, some of your recent videos sound too "boomy" or maybe "bassy" might be the right word, and I try to watch them but it's not as pleasant nor engaging for me, honestly I might just be the petty one here but I have binged all your videos and it is thanks to you that I have come to know more about the History of aviation in my country.
Was Margaret Thatcher really anti-rail, if she was only against loss making aspects of the system? If road transport was more efficient in some circumstances then why would a government not back it?
Client by client is already starting to make some what of a come back, with various sizes construction and aggregate companies now using formally closed sidings to load and unload large quantities of material.. Highland spring also have their own terminal now which they have also made available to other customers wishing to use it.... Won't be long now 😊😊😊
5:23 seldom seen footage of a GWR Shunter’s Truck! I’ve got a few of these on our OO/HO Layout “SLSFLNER” and I’ve always wondered what footage of one looked like.
Also, with the demise of Speedlink.. RFD attempted to absorb as much traffic as possible into block trains, termed contract services, and / or company trains (though they often carried more than one customers wagons). Use of assets in marginal time allowed in particular chemicals traffic to be retrained on certain routes.
