Freight Traffic
Consideration of freight traffic is all important to the future of the railways. as a nation-wide system. Without freight the main railway network could not exist. Although passenger trains can be operated profitably over main routes where they have to contribute only a part of the route cost, they would, on their own, be capable of supporting only a small fraction of the existing route mileage outside the London suburban area. It is encouraging to see, therefore, how well freight traffic is spread over all the routes on which passenger train services are likely to continue.
It can be seen, by comparing the freight density map with the passenger density map, that practically all routes which carry over 10,000 passengers a week, carry at least 10,000 tons of freight. It is evident, too, that a very high proportion of lines which are dotted or dashed on the passenger map, i.e. lines over which passenger services are normally found to be uneconomic, are also shown dotted, as very low density lines, on the freight map. Provided the general level of freight business can be built up, therefore, there is promise that freight and passenger traffics will prove mutually supporting over most of that half of the total route mileage which carries 95 per cent. of all traffic at present, while very little freight or passenger traffic will be lost if most of the remainder is closed.
The possibility of generating and handling more remunerative freight traffic is of key importance. Before we turn to that subject, however, some attention must be given to the present method of freight handling on the railways, because success in attracting traffic and making it remunerative will depend upon improvements in the system of moving it.
Present Method of Handling Freight Traffic
Whereas all passengers move on services which can be individually distinguished and identifiably associated with particular routes, this is not so with most freight. Some freight traffic is carried by through trains, but the greater part of it moves quite differently, by a system which can best be understood in the light of its history.
Our railways were developed to their fullest extent at a time when the horse and cart were the only means of feeding to and distributing from them. Therefore, as the railways grew, because of the deficiencies of horse transport on poor roads, the main network of routes was extended by an even closer network of branches, with close spacing of stations over the whole system, in order to reduce road movement to a minimum. Because of this penetration of rail movement so far into the stages of collection and delivery, and the associated multiplicity of stations and depots, a great deal of traffic originated and terminated in single wagon load consignments.
Over the same era, there was a linking of the mainline railways into a national network, with an enormous increase in the number of places to which traffic originating in any one place might be consigned. As a result, the wagon became the unit of movement and through working of trains was largely suppressed. Instead, nearly all freight moved by the staging of wagons from marshalling yard to marshalling yard, with variable and cumulative delays in them, so that the overall journey was bound to be slow and unpredictable.
24
