UK Freight Rail?

Hi Ukaflyer

Yes, it appears that I continue to not get it, if "it" is accepting as correct every decision regarding freight train capacity in Britain for the last 100 years.  Even if I did believe that your own statement about projected growth would indicate that some of those decisions should be revisited to consider how to meet changing conditions.

Currently I believe the ratio of passenger to freight is around 70/30 split, just FYI.

Is 70/30 by:

a.  number of trains

b.  gross revenue

or

c.  net revenue

if a fireman was capable of keeping the fire going, why spend money on a mechanical stoker, it is just another expense not needed and increases build and maintenance costs and also time/parts at overhaul periods.

If Lucas (prince of darkness) was building your stokers that might be a reasonable way of thinking.  In the North American experience it was fount that stokers don't catch a cold or a flue and some are not 5' 6" while some are 6' 5".  They allow for consistent full utilization of locomotive power.  And they helped attract and retain men who thought they could do more than shovel several tonnes of coal every day.  When faced with senseless drudgery many sought better employment.  Some even bought passage on ships bound for places like New York or Halifax to seek better opportunities. 

if you understood how  much consumer goods cost over here by large multinational companies and what it cost outside the UK, then you will realise a few extra pennies on each item in transportation is peanuts!

Pennies times millions of items a day means billions every year.

Freight is predicted to grow for the next 15 years at quite a rate, question is will our network support increased passenger and freight at the same time?

 

Knowing how the network is dimensioned in the South I don't personally see how it can be increased due to land constraints.

The time honored method to increase the productivity of freight trains is to make each train carry more goods.  To do that they can either have more cars or have cars with greater capacity.  Either approach requires investment in some combinations of clearances, couplers, brakes or heavier axle loads to accommodate the higher capacity.

I don't dispute how the British rail network got to where it is today.  For about 100 years all of the calculations of improved capacity vs. cost resulted in leaving things as they were and market share was lost to other more efficient modes.  Now, as you noted, demand for rail freight service is growing and you have a constrained footprint from within which the growing demand must be met.  Perhaps now those investment vs. productivity calculations will start to come out another way.

There are plenty of places around the world to look for examples of practices and equipment to efficiently handle heavier trains.  Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas all have plenty of operations to examine.  But few will have screw couplers. 

Here you go Ted, a long one to get stuck into. I'm sure many of the questions I have raised can be answered by others as well.

Re your fetish for couplings, if our good old screw couplings are inferior to a knuckle.....

If?  Really?

If you are truly having a hard time believing that automatic couplers are superior to your "good old screw couplings"  I'm not sure where to begin. 

I have no "fetish" for couplers of any type.  There are a couple of styles of automatic couplers in use globally.  They have been well regarded around the world as the strongest, safest most efficient way to couple cars for more than a century.

can you tell me what happens to a train if the knuckle fails?

Certainly.  When a knuckle coupler fails the cars begin to separate and glad hands on the air hoses part.  The loss of air pressure puts the brakes into emergency and the train stops.  A trainman walks back until they find where the train has parted and replaces the knuckle.  The train is then recoupled, the air is recharged and the train is back on it's way. 

While broken knuckles or even broken drawbars do happen they are simple to replace, don't happen as frequently as you seem to think and it takes over half a million pounds of force to do it.  That is why with modern North American AC traction locomotives you don't see more than three pulling on the head end of a train, they can produce over 400,000 pounds of force and four would overtax the couplers.

To reject the use of the knuckle coupler due to the fact that they do fail from time to time makes about as much sense as sticking with "good old" solid rubber tires on cars an trucks because "those fancy new fangled" pneumatic tires can go flat.  When it comes to couplers and tires something better really did come along 100 years ago.

As for the acceptance of modern couplers around the world here are photos of locomotives from countries large and small where automatic couplers have been in use for decades.

Australia.

Brazil

South Africa on 3' 6" Cape Gauge

Lithuania

Automatic couplers are in use in smaller nations like Viet Nam.

Even in a small, densely populated island nation with many passenger trains and 3' 6" gauge railways automatic couplers were adopted a century ago.  This is Japan.

Indian Railways have adopted automatic couplers but their locomotives have combination couplers so that they can pull older rolling stock as needed.

Lastly, your other pet topic brakes, the use of vacuum brakes on steam locos was used because it was a cheap simple system by the use of a steam ejector. I guess the companies at the time considered the use of air meant a compressor which is another item with a cost and for maintenance. Once steam vanished the use of vacuum was an obsolete system and air then became the preferred option from the 60's.

Air brakes were adopted in many places around the world due to to their simple physical advantage.  A vacuum brake cylinder is limited to a theoretical maximum of 14.7 pounds of force per square inch of area.  Real world forces are something less than the theoretical.  By going to a pressurized system several times more force per square inch of cylinder is available.  More powerful locomotives, stronger couplers and more powerful brakes for a given size all go together.  World railways didn't buy pet systems or go in for fetishes, they just went with the best and most cost effective systems available.  Steam powered air compressors are like automatic couplers or pneumatic tires in reliability and overall benefit.  They really are better than the old way.

Typical of our mindset to spend as little as possible if the current system works OK.

Typical indeed.  Even stereotypical.  So much so that it prompts me to wonder if you trying to paint a caricature for the entertainment of the readers of this thread.

There is an old saying that the cheap man pays the most.  Fortunes have been made all around the world by devising ways to do things that are just a little bit better and a few pennies cheaper.  Those small savings in many places all around an economy help everyone.  The saved resources can be devoted to serving other needs, saving yet more and an upward spiral builds.

As we all know, Britain was a world leader in heavy manufacturing and the export of transportation equipment including ships and locomotives a hundred years ago. Railroads of limited loading gauge and light axle loads and the "mindset to spend as little as possible if the current system works OK" probably didn't help as Japan, Korea, China, Germany and the US invested in more efficient steel, ship, automobile, aircraft and locomotive production.

Resisting well developed technical improvements due to unfounded fears of failure and the mentality that good enough will do didn't serve economies well in the 19th century or the 20th.  I doubt that it will in the 21st.

As our OP first asked

I have been watching some vids on UK Railroads and just wonder why their rolling stock looks so small and out of date compared to the USA?

Along with the other fine posts on this thread perhaps our exchanges have helped to illuminate some of the historic, economic, technical and sociological reasons that have produced the situation the Mike W. has asked about.