Royal mail to stop using Rail.

[GrumpyPenguin]

1 hour ago, Reorte said:

Lorries might be slower than trains but I'd be surprised if that adds up to much overall difference in delivery times (which in any case these days seem to be dominated by factors other than the means used to move the mail).

Trucks trundle along at a maximum of 56mph, far slower than a train at (I'm guessing here) 90mph.

 

However, factor in 2 x extra load/unloads if rail is used (time & costs) and road/HGV is more attractive.

 

Also consider that road is more flexible - a truck is easily re-routed should circumstances dictate it, rail of course can never achieve that flexibility.

 

Also, it's easy enough for RM to hire in agency drivers for it's own fleet, tractor units for it's own trailers or complete artics with or without drivers.

 

Much as we would all like to see more freight by rail it's not happening in the UK except maybe for fixed bulk routes.

[The Stationmaster]

4 minutes ago, Reorte said:

It can be economically efficient doing that, just not in any other sense.

It will be overall as it will involve fewer people than dealing with it locally would have.  And mail still has to be transferred between here and Swindon Sorting Centre wherever it is going to/has come from so that road journey is not there purely for any local mail.

 

Yes it dies sound daft but the transit isn't any slower sender to recipient than it would have been dealt with in the old way

[The Stationmaster]

5 minutes ago, GrumpyPenguin said:

Trucks trundle along at a maximum of 56mph, far slower than a train at (I'm guessing here) 90mph.

 

However, factor in 2 x extra load/unloads if rail is used (time & costs) and road/HGV is more attractive.

 

Also consider that road is more flexible - a truck is easily re-routed should circumstances dictate it, rail of course can never achieve that flexibility.

 

Also, it's easy enough for RM to hire in agency drivers for it's own fleet, tractor units for it's own trailers or complete artics with or without drivers.

 

Much as we would all like to see more freight by rail it's not happening in the UK except maybe for fixed bulk routes.

Another interesting, but little thought, of effect was the way mail handling impacted on train punctuality.  While there were limits on the amount of Parcel Post that could be loaded/unloaded during a station stop the quantity of Letter Mail was almost entirely at the whim of the Post Office.  Thus trains could be, and were, over time at stations handling van traffic and this could, and did, noticeably impact adversely on timekeeping.  It was noticeable how punctuality of Class 1 trains on the WR improved during a strike of Post Office staff and that also proved that station overtime was obviously frequently being inadequately recorded at many larger stations.

 

And above all let's not forget the blindingly obvious facts that nowadays virtually all passenger trains running in Britain have no suitable van accommodation for either parcels or mail traffic, nor do they have the dwell time at many stations to enable it to be dealt with.  Plus of course many such trains don't in any case have a Guard so they can't carry mail anyway!

[Bernard Lamb]

On 22/07/2024 at 09:24, KingEdwardII said:

I certainly do. I always prefer a package delivery via Royal Mail, based on my experiences with them and with numerous other delivery companies. RM are reliable and generally deliver when they say. The worst aspect of some of the other companies is that if they are unable to deliver a package to my door, then I have to trog half way across the county to their depot - the RM office in my local town is close and convenient, by comparison.

 

I have also never had RM misdeliver a package, something not true of some of the other companies.

 

On the other hand, some of the other companies do have excellent apps with tracking capabilities - DPD is one of the best, not only showing the location of the courier, but also indicating how many stops before they get to me. RM don't have anything equivalent.

 

Yours, Mike.

If that is still the case then you are very fortunate. 

Twice last week the post was delivered to next door. The second time the chap realized his mistake and knocked to pick up the mail and re-deliver it.

As for six days a week, big joke. My medication was due for delivery on Saturday. I received the usual email notification. Then I received two emails saying delivery was not possible and that it would be delivered on the next working day. It did not arrive with the post on Monday. It was delivered by a plain clothes chap in a plain white van at just after 18:00.

They seem to be having very serious staff and transport problems. I live aroud three miles from the large area depot, so not a case of getting to a local depot and then having problems.

Bernard

[Steven B]

16 hours ago, lmsforever said:

replacing eight or four coaches full of mail is not a good idea.The replacement lorries will be slow unable to carry a useful   load meaning a high number of vehicles will constantly on the road

 

There's an assumption being made throughout this thread that the class 325s are running jam-packed full. Does anyone know if this is the case? Not much point running a 4 car EMU if there's only enough traffic to fill half of it (particularly if that EMU is approaching the point that it's life expired.

 

It'd also be interesting to see how the Royal Mail network evolves as a result. Whilst a train is great at getting post from A to B over a long distance, if it then needs to go onwards to C and D then it might actually be more efficient to send the lorry from A to C, whilst also exchanging mail at E and F en-route.

 

Steven B

[Reorte]

44 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

It will be overall as it will involve fewer people than dealing with it locally would have.  And mail still has to be transferred between here and Swindon Sorting Centre wherever it is going to/has come from so that road journey is not there purely for any local mail.

 

Yes it dies sound daft but the transit isn't any slower sender to recipient than it would have been dealt with in the old way

This is another example of where I fully understand the reasons but still very much dislike the results. I don't dispute that it probably won't be any slower, as I said earlier, but it might be more inefficient in terms of resources other than human ones. That adds up to economically more attractive, something that doesn't always lead to a better world.

 

I believe very strongly that a constant drive to distance people from tasks, or to remove them altogether, whilst it can often make good economic sense has become very damaging to society overall. People often try to counter that by pointing to the efficiency gains involved in earlier mechanisation and automation that means most of us aren't peasants any more, but that just comes across as solving yesterday's problems. I don't know what the solution to today's problems is, but I don't think we're solving the right ones.

[SED Freightman]

The reasons for the demise of Royal Mail traffic are many and varied as already outlined by several posters above, but possibly the greatest disincentive was the movement of sorting offices away from central locations adjacent to stations, once large volumes of mail had to be transported to and from rail facilities by road it may have just as well stayed on the lorry.  The Railnet scheme centred on Willesden and only serving a few high volume flows to rail connected MLO's (Mechanised Letter Offices) was something of a last gasp for rail.  A huge amount of money was invested into the Willesden Railnet Terminal which is leased (from either DB or Network Rail), how long before Royal Mail find a much cheaper warehouse (if they actually still need one) to operate from once the requirement for rail services finishes.  Locally the MLO at Tonbridge was constructed with its own platform although even then it was not possible for Up services to call directly due to the lack of a facing crossover so any northbound service immediately suffered a time penalty by having to shunt via the station or West Yard, but no longer a problem since the end of rail service some years ago.  Although the Tonbridge MLO is still occupied by Royal Mail, probably due to being tied into a long lease, West Kent's post is now sorted at their Medway premises which are no doubt well situated for the M2.  As the postal side of the business continues to contract, the new owners will no doubt be looking to offload more sites that have development potential.

 

As Steven B has suggested, the road network will continue to evolve and become more efficient, particularly with the use of double deck road trailers (eg. https://www.commercialmotor.com/news/article/royal-mail-adds-45-new-don-bur-trailers  ) compared to the single deck loading on Class 325's.

 

Hopefully some mail traffic will continue to be moved by one of the new rail operators, but it will I suspect it will be a very niche operation.

[009 micro modeller]

8 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

And above all let's not forget the blindingly obvious facts that nowadays virtually all passenger trains running in Britain have no suitable van accommodation for either parcels or mail traffic, nor do they have the dwell time at many stations to enable it to be dealt with.

Agree with your first point, and generally the latter bit in bold as well. That said, on Mail Rail in London dwell times of less than a minute were achieved at one stage through the use of roll cages (called Yorks) and ramps that hinged down from the train onto the platform. The individual mailbags contained within could then be sorted in between trains. It’s a bit of a different context of course as that was a closed system of very small trains, running extremely frequently and only carrying mail, so probably not completely applicable elsewhere.

 

As you point out there’s also the lack of on-train staff (on local/commuter trains, some of the problems of space and dwell time might also be reduced on intercity trains but they perhaps don’t have the same flexibility), so potentially someone (probably a postal rather than railway person) would have to accompany the mail on the train, again not particularly efficient. I do occasionally see cycle couriers travelling by train but that’s a means for an individual person to slightly speed things up over just cycling directly to where they’re going.

 

8 hours ago, Steven B said:

It'd also be interesting to see how the Royal Mail network evolves as a result. Whilst a train is great at getting post from A to B over a long distance, if it then needs to go onwards to C and D then it might actually be more efficient to send the lorry from A to C, whilst also exchanging mail at E and F en-route.

Isn’t this similar to the ‘hub and spoke vs point to point’ discussion, often talked about in relation to air travel?

 

10 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

The later difference of course came from Royal mail concentrating all sorting, by then fully mechanised, on large centres.

This was partially what did for Mail Rail as well (in addition to the fact that it didn’t go to Willesden, and the high cost of tunnelling for any potential extension or deviation etc.). On closure only four of the stations were still in use, now only one of them (Mount Pleasant) still has a sorting office above it (I think one of the others retains (or at least recently retained) a Post Office counter in part of the old building, but that’s not really the same thing).

 

9 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

Just for the record as a matter of fact the Post Office was carrying mail traffic (at that time mainly, but far from exclusively, Parcel Post) by road between sorting offices in 1969.  I saw as part of my everyday work road movements included in PO mail schedules clearly identified  by the letters OMV - which stood for 'Own Motor Vehicle'.    Not even I, although it was part of my working life, would necessarily refer to that as 'a recent development'.

It might have been me that used the phrase ‘relatively recent’ in relation to this, where to be fair ‘relatively’ is doing a lot of work as I sort of meant ‘since the twentieth century’ (which is relatively recent in terms of the overall history of Royal Mail, but not so much in railway terms). And I was thinking generally about the direct operation of Mail transport generally by the GPO and successors, as opposed to contracting it out or relying on an existing privately run service. The horse-drawn post coaches that the railways replaced (as they similarly replaced stagecoaches), the horse-drawn vans that carried mail between London sorting offices and stations (a task subsequently done by the GPO-owned London Post Office Railway) and the experimental Pneumatic Dispatch Company railway in the 1860s were all privately operated.