Parcels on Trains

[TheEdge]

In a mostly unrelated matter I'd love to see a fly on the wall series inside the Royal Mail, like the recent railway ones. Baffles my mind about how I can send a letter from my little village in Norfolk and it can be anywhere on the UK mainland within 24 hours

 

[ChiefPlanner]

The HoW used to carry a weekly fish parcel to , I think Llandeilo.

Was asked about carting London Evening Standards to Northampton off peak in my day - was keen on the idea , but it never transpired.

 

[andrewkeith5]

So that seems to disprove what was said by AndrewK5 above

It does seem to, and I'm happy to be corrected, but with some admittedly quick Googling, I can't find any evidence of a mail train operating. Happy to be proved wrong, of course!

 

[Darandio]

It does seem to, and I'm happy to be corrected, but with some admittedly quick Googling, I can't find any evidence of a mail train operating. Happy to be proved wrong, of course!

I can assure you they do, just this minute one has passed through Crewe!

 

[andrewkeith5]

In a mostly unrelated matter I'd love to see a fly on the wall series inside the Royal Mail, like the recent railway ones. Baffles my mind about how I can send a letter from my little village in Norfolk and it can be anywhere on the UK mainland within 24 hours

I might be wrong, but I seem to recall there being one a few years ago - only a few episodes - or maybe I'm just imagining it.

Either way, I would most definitely watch it!

In the meantime, you could try the race that Top Gear did - they pitched Hammond and May in an Porsche Panamera against a letter with a first class stamp from the most southernly point in Britain to the most northerly point. It was quite an interesting watch and covered a lot of the facilties that the Royal Mail have at their disposal Incidentally, that letter was flown on two aeroplanes and a helicopter...

 

[andrewkeith5]

I can assure you they do, just this minute one has passed through Crewe!

Fascinating I'd love to see details of how they operate it and what for. Presumably it's only the first class mail that travels by air...

 

[NorthernSpirit]

With the Pacer units being ready for disposal, couldn't these units be converted for parcel traffic?

 

[furnessvale]

Fascinating I'd love to see details of how they operate it and what for. Presumably it's only the first class mail that travels by air...

This page from RealTimeTrains will give you an idea of what happens at Warrington. This shows paths, not every train runs every day. Not sure of the class of mail carried but I see no reason why first class from London or Glasgow to the North West cannot match air timings.

http://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/sea...17/05/17/0000-2359?stp=WVS&show=all&order=wtt

 

[SpacePhoenix]

In a mostly unrelated matter I'd love to see a fly on the wall series inside the Royal Mail, like the recent railway ones. Baffles my mind about how I can send a letter from my little village in Norfolk and it can be anywhere on the UK mainland within 24 hours

[youtube]OH_vMmpnT74[/youtube]

There's a DVD called "Special Delivery" that shows the working of a TPO train just before the TPOs finished

 

[pitdiver]

I can remember when you were able to take your luggage to your local station and a couple days later it would have been delivered to your holiday accommodation. On many occasions may parents would do this very thing for our summer holidays. Including Isle of Wight. As a child it always impressed me how this process worked.

 

[swt_passenger]

It does seem to, and I'm happy to be corrected, but with some admittedly quick Googling, I can't find any evidence of a mail train operating. Happy to be proved wrong, of course!

It perhaps depends exactly what you looked for. There are certainly none of the old style "travelling post office" trains, full of chaps sorting the mail en route. The Class 325s are carrying containerised mail from one distribution centre to another. For the specific routes they cover they must still be more cost effective than the alternative of a significant fleet of lorries.

 

[DarloRich]

In a mostly unrelated matter I'd love to see a fly on the wall series inside the Royal Mail, like the recent railway ones. Baffles my mind about how I can send a letter from my little village in Norfolk and it can be anywhere on the UK mainland within 24 hours

24 hours ish

Fascinating I'd love to see details of how they operate it and what for. Presumably it's only the first class mail that travels by air...

Pre sorted letter mail in bulk between key locations. The train will be quicker from London to Warrington than by air

 

[edwin_m]

The advantage of the TPOs was that the mail could be sorted on the move, so rail could still win over air for some quite long distances once the time needed to sort the mail before and/or after the flight was taken into account. However this advantage diminished with the advent of machine sorting, which is quicker and cheaper but can't be done on a train. And with electronic communication replacing much of the post and other companies competing with the former monopoly, the economies of scale with rail are gradually being eroded anyway.

I'm not sure how much parcel traffic (if any) goes on the 325s, but it seems to me that exploiting that large and growing market is the only way to keep them going in the long term. This might include selling on-train space to different courier companies if the competition issues can be overcome.

 

[Skimpot flyer]

24 hours ish



Pre sorted letter mail in bulk between key locations. The train will be quicker from London to Warrington than by air

Without going into too much detail, I can assure you that letter mail is in rapid decline, as per Royal Mail's year-end results announcement today.

The vast majority of mail conveyed by rail today is the product of the boom in internet shopping - parcels of all shapes and sizes. Stuff ordered using Amazon and other online retailers is still a growth market, outstripping the decline in letters, and this trend will continue.

A 12-car service can take, I seem to recall, approximately 700-720 of the wheeled containers you see in this photo. (The containers can be fitted with cardboard sleeves, and thus smaller packets can also can be conveyed without risk of falling through the bars of the basic container).

This http://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/train/P91332/2017/05/17/advanced particular service runs weekdays (excluding Monday) and departs with the kind of punctuality that I can only dream of on my commute. It even ran, recently, when Euston was shutdown due to the lineside fire at South Hampstead...

When we had flooding 'up north' last year (or was it it 2015?, I forget), that particular train had to run via Camden Road and the ECML

 

[SpacePhoenix]

In years to come once a decent amount of HS2 has been built would Royal Mail possibly look at the feasibility of using HS2 to replace some of the stuff they send by plane?

 

[jopsuk]

possibly, although La Poste have, as far as I know, abandoned using trains- they had TGV variants specially built. Someone was proposing using them trans-manche, but beyond hauling one all the way into St Pancras for a photo op, nothing has come of that.

 

[takno]

In years to come once a decent amount of HS2 has been built would Royal Mail possibly look at the feasibility of using HS2 to replace some of the stuff they send by plane?

Same-day delivery already has to be resourced from local-ish delivery centres. For overnight delivery I can't see saving 60-90 minutes as being worth the cost. The more likely scenario is that there is room to fit a robust mail on the classic railway with lower access charges.

 

[edwin_m]

Same-day delivery already has to be resourced from local-ish delivery centres. For overnight delivery I can't see saving 60-90 minutes as being worth the cost. The more likely scenario is that there is room to fit a robust mail on the classic railway with lower access charges.

Also HS2 will be closed overnight for engineering access.

 

[CosherB]

In years to come once a decent amount of HS2 has been built would Royal Mail possibly look at the feasibility of using HS2 to replace some of the stuff they send by plane?

Basically, no.

 

[Rover]

We did, and very successfully too, using free space on the trains that was otherwise empty. The customers brought their parcels to the station and collected them at the other end. Net cost to the railway almost zero.

The some bright spark decided to bring in collection and delivery vans and costs started mounting.

Then an even brighter spark decided what the railway really needed was to hire in AIRCRAFT to serve remoter areas and costs went through the roof!

Red Star shut down facing mounting losses. I wonder why!

The reason Red Star parcels shut down was because of privatisation. The tories had to get rid of the parcels sector in order to privatise the rest of BR and to do that they had to create a stand alone company with its own assets.

Costs arose where there weren't any before like having to pay rent for parcels offices, labour costs for staff where previously BR railmen would put parcels on trains, paying the TOCs for space on their trains, costs that were previously all included in the whole of BR.

They eventually sold it for £1 to a management buyout who sold it to Lynx a few years later. I believe it was the Hatfield derailment

 

[Peter Mugridge]

possibly, although La Poste have, as far as I know, abandoned using trains- they had TGV variants specially built. Someone was proposing using them trans-manche, but beyond hauling one all the way into St Pancras for a photo op, nothing has come of that.

Those postal TGVs have since been scrapped. Literally.

 

[SpacePhoenix]

Excluding 325s, would 442s have been the last multiple units to have a secure parcel area of some description?

 

[LowLevel]

Excluding 325s, would 442s have been the last multiple units to have a secure parcel area of some description?

Class 158s had a lockable luggage rack.