Most cars stand idle in car parks or garages or at the kerb most of the time. How does that compare with a train?
The real problem is that since privatisation there was no incentive to make the railways freight-friendly. No one has regarded them as a national asset, rather as a national liability with a few profitable commuter lines.
That will change as fuel prices carry on rising. There will be money to be made, on freight, again.
You mean railways? Well, every other country seems to have them - including the US.
Interesting turn of phrase 'wasting society's resources'. Personally, I think of railways *as* one of society's resources.
While paying more per person for train fares per person than the entire journey would cost for the car, including the parking and all the fixed costs of car ownership, IME. That's assuming the last possible train that gets you home doesn't leave ten minutes before the end of the performance.
There's probably a direct bus that would get you there and back for a fiver, though.
There is a long running planning row locally concerning a rail/road interchange near St. Albans. Looks sensible to me but I don't live or work there.
American freight trains puzzle me as they appear to travel very slowly.
Also, why is speed of importance? In terms of total journey time does 70 or 125mph make such a huge difference? House to station, station to mainline, passenger stops on route, taxi to final destination.... Could more trains be run in total at the slower speed as motorway traffic?
Ah. that sounds pretty much the same place I grew up.
I used to cycle to woking in about 25 mins..
From KT24 no, there isn't.
there was one for a couple of years - about 10 years ago. 3 a day each way. No a lot of use if you want to go to the theatre in the evening and get home afterwards.
Barely.
Society's resources are people and money. The railways, like any enterprise, need/consume some of the resources to perform a function. The question is how much resources in order to achieve a certain desired result.
The desired result is to move people and goods from where they start to various required destinations. The desired result is *not* specifically to run a railway (any more than it is to run airlines, buses, or anything else in particular). That is to say, no mode of transport has an inherent right to exist, just because it has existed in the past or is "cute". This is a point that railway anoraks and TGV willy-wavers overlook.
Since my journey by air from Cambridge to Glasgow was considerably cheaper by plane than that by train, I deduce that fewer of society's resources are consumed by the plane mode of transport than by train. Since Tesco, Sainsbury, et al, move their goods in 44-tonners, I conclude they've made the same calculation.
The Boston-Chicago-Washington DC triangle is fairly well served. But there are vast areas with little or no service.
Are there any studies about this approach? Of course it mirrors what Fedex and all that lot do it in US with packages. You send a package from (say) San Jose to (say) San Francisco (about 50 miles), it could easily go via Atlanta.
The essence of the business has to be speed of handling. I remember from my Eagle Book of Trains (circa 1952) they were talking about the hump marshalling yards, where it took a couple of days to make up a train.
In a lot of instances, the track is in a really shitty state. Derailments are frequent. Also when the train is a mile or more long, with a couple of engines at each end, possibly a couple in the middle (not sure about that), you need to take it carefully.
well the roads ARE heavily subsidised..
start writing one...
Of course it mirrors what
indeed. 19th century methods.
When I worked in Stoke marshalling yard, we used to make up at least half a dozen trains a shift by sorting the wagons that came in on a different half dozen trains. About 150 waggons in total. At the yard I worked in which was connected to a coal mine, we sent out up to two trains per hour from a similar number of trains of empties coming in and being loaded. After I left, they could turn round a train in under half an hour using the Merry Go Round system, in addition to the other workings.
Then again, these were British trains of up to 40 waggons, whereas if you look at the American trains, they are a lot longer, and I suspect that these are what the Eagle Book Of trains is referring to.
What killed the railways off for waggon load traffic was the delays while the waggon got shunted from train to train, taking days to get from A to B. The same load on a lorry took hours, as it didn't need shunting at many yards along the way. For the same reasons, it was cheaper to send stuff by lorry once the road network and lorries were good enough to cope.
Most unusual for a plane journey to cost less door to door in the UK.
Not in the UK. If you add up all the various taxes that people pay to use the roads, the total exceeds by far the amount the various government branches spend on repair, maintenance and expansion of the road network. The road taxation subsidises other government expenditure, if anything. In 2010, total income from VED and fuel tax alone was over £32 billion. toal expenditure on *all* forms of transport by the government was under £23 Billion. Expenditure on roads was less than $10 billion.
It depends how far ahead you can book. Then again, if you book far enough ahead, you can get from Manchester to London for a quid each way by Megabus.
Yes I've never managed to get an air ticket yet on the cheap;!.
Always wanting to go there and then at short notice..
Whatever do you mean by that?.
Yes, as most people want or need to travel at the same times...
In article , Tim Streater scribeth thus
If it think it was the one your referring to it was "pathed" over night when there is less passenger thru-put...
I needed to go to Aberdeen this summer, the rail was in fact 20 quid cheaper then the plane and that didn't include the trip to Luton which was by coach and took ages...
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