Rail freight in Great Britain
Horse-drawn lines were increasingly common by the 18th and early 19th centuries, chiefly to haul bulk materials from mines to canal wharves or areas of consumption.
Steam powered rail freight operated regularly on the Middleton Railway, near Leeds, long before any passenger services.
The LMR was originally intended to carry goods[7] between the Port of Liverpool and east Lancashire, although it subsequently developed as mixed passenger-goods railway.
The Post Office began using letter-sorting carriages in 1838, and the railway quickly proved to be a much quicker and more efficient means of transport than the old mail coaches.
[9] Indeed, thousands of tonnes of munitions and supplies were distributed from all over Great Britain to ports in the South East of England for shipping to France and the Front Line.
Due to pre-war inefficiencies in the rail goods transport, a number of economisation programmes were needed to allow the railways to meet with the huge demand that was being put on their services.
The success of such schemes was entirely down to the collaboration of more than 100 railway companies, who abandoned the fierce competition of the pre-war years to work together in the national interest.
During the early stages of the war, goods trains ran to rural stations in Norfolk to enable airfields to be constructed.
Under the 1955 British Rail Modernisation Plan, massive investment was made in marshalling yards at a time when the use of small wagon load traffic with which they dealt was in steep decline.
Railway freight services had been in steady decline since the 1930s, initially because of the loss of the manufacturing industry and then road haulage's cost advantage in combination with higher wages.
[13] The Beeching cuts included a reduction in freight services, especially the marshalling yards, to concentrate on long distance bulk transport.
[7] In contrast to passenger services, they greatly modernised the goods sector, replacing inefficient wagons with containerised regional hubs.
[6] In 1986, quarrying company Foster Yeoman prompted a turnaround in the reliability of rail freight by obtaining permission to run its own locomotives, and importing the first four EMD class 59s.
When British Rail was privatised in the 1990s, six freight operating companies (FOCs) were set up: The opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 allowed direct goods trains to run between the UK and the continent for the first time.
[10][20] Major road haulage operations such as the Stobart Group and WH Malcolm move goods by rail, hauling supplies for Asda and Tesco.
A symbolic loss to the rail freight industry in Great Britain was the custom of the Royal Mail, which from 2004 discontinued use of its 49-train fleet, switching to road haulage after a near 170-year preference for trains.
[28] Recent growth is partly due to more international services including the Channel Tunnel and Port of Felixstowe, which is containerised.
