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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by Simon Reed Good thinking, Futuremodal, but once again remember the geography of the UK. Probably 95% of the population of Britain, excluding Northern Ireland, live in the area between the South Coast and the Scottish Central Lowlands. I would imagine that the longest "as the crow flies" line you could draw within that landmass would be about 650 miles. Probably over 99% of manufacturing and production goes on within that area too. For internal traffic, therefore, there is no time or money incentive to develop bi-modal flows. The road network in Britain is comprehensive and, for the most part, toll-free so a trailer setting off from, say, Plymouth in the South West of the country might reach Dundee in the North East within 16 hours, which means that only two drivers would be required. Factor in the time for transhipment at a railhead closest to the shipper and customers businesses and even a direct rail service would struggle to beat that timing. That's assuming that there is sufficient demand for a direct Plymouth - Dundee service. Factor in the cost that the TOC would have to recover from the development and construction of a fleet of suitable cars and the provision of transhipment facilities and the trucking companies are probably 10 times cheaper. [/quote] So it's really a question of adaquate capacity available on the road network, e.g. you're not dealing with congestion outside the industrial core? In the U.S. it is estimated that bi-modal operations can be profitable in corridors as short as 350 miles, and modal transfer costs using bi-modal are so much lower than the modal transfer costs of containerization. With the fuel price differential between rail and road even more pronounced in the U.K., I would have thought that corridors as short as 200 miles would be viable for bi-modal operations.
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