Adrian Barr
Member
I'd never heard of the aluminium sidings being re-used, but apparently this is the "Anglesey Rail intermodal freight terminal (ARiFT)"
The place is mentioned in a brief news item on the Modern Railways website in 2018 - https://www.modernrailways.com/article/terminal-holyhead
Similar info in a newsletter from the Rail Freight Group - http://www.rfg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/RFG-News-Issue-131-September-2018-FINAL.pdf
Slightly longer piece here based on a press release - https://www.ibj-online.com/arift-handles-first-holyhead-rail-freight-operation/326
The 4D62 03:13 Wembley - Holyhead and 4A26 16:10 return paths in the WTT look like part of the long term planning for that place, but these kind of paths sometimes appear without necessarily coming to fruition.
It's not clear if this is the intention, or if they were anticipating UK - Ireland traffic. Paths from Wembley would seem to indicate an origin from south east ports or the channel tunnel. I'm not sure if moving containers / swapbodies from Europe to Ireland by rail to Anglesey and onto the ferry on lorries at Holyhead would be viable (not to mention the potential complications of Brexit for such movements) when there are shipping services for containers from, say, Rotterdam to Dublin, or RoRo services from Rotterdam and Zeebrugge to Dublin. But it certainly looks like the idea was for intermodal services of some sort, so you might be right. Edit: I think the lack of gauge clearance along the North Wales Coast would be a significant problem, shows W6A in the sectional appendix which is inadequate for most combinations of wagons and containers.
I think these are deep sea boxes, apparently the Port of Liverpool handles 45% of the UK's transatlantic trade. Liverpool has been upgraded in recent years to handle the largest container ships, and part of the aim was to attract calls from ships which would normally call at south east ports, with the rail link to Scotland improving the connections available. https://www.peelports.com/our-ports/liverpool
This article gives a specific example of Walkers shortbread being exported from Scotland to the USA using this train - https://www.railfreight.com/railfre...usting-liverpool-mossend-intermodal-services/
My knowledge of shipping is pretty limited but I get the impression that containers being shipped between Dublin and Liverpool would most likely be using it as a feeder service to connect with longer distance deep sea or European destinations. There's a Maersk sailing that appears to do a circuit from Liverpool > Greenock > Dublin > Liverpool for example. To move goods from Ireland to Scotland, it would seem simpler to road them all the way, perhaps use the short Larne - Cairnryan sailing, rather than the loading and unloading involved for a container going from road to ship to rail to road again on an indirect and fairly slow route via Liverpool.
Photo taken by Adrian Nicholls inside Seaforth terminal - https://www.flickr.com/photos/36034969@N08/46680127461
Incidentally, the headcode change from 4S35 to 4S38 was to help distinguish between the weekday schedules running via St Helens or Earlestown, due to a restriction on the northbound run at Earlestown which would prevent high cube containers being loaded to the FXAs.
This video by Peel Ports gives an interesting (slightly speeded-up!) view of the service leaving the terminal:
Peel Ports container rail service leaving the Port of Liverpool for Mossend
There are other videos on the Peel Ports channel showing the giant new dockside container cranes, and the time-lapse video titled "Peel Ports Night and Day Video" is worth watching to get an idea of shipping operations. There are giant container ships calling at the new "Liverpool 2" terminal and smaller feeder services going through the lock to the inner part of the port to access the "Royal Seaforth Container Terminal"
Last edited:
