Peter

One freight train removes 40 HGVs from the road and consumes 20% of the
fuel.
Make long distance truck delivery (say over 50 miles) illegal and use road
vehicles for short drops from strategically placed new railheads built to
serve the public rather than the shareholders. It's so simple, the
government couldn't grasp it. The only people to disagree with this are the
road hauliers with their own pockets to line.
British rail was far more efficient on a tiny subsidy than the privatised
cowboys and they killed hundreds less passengers!
Peter

Colonel Tupperware

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 18:52:51 +0100, "Peter"
<peterf.zipcaplen@homecall.co.uk> wrote:

>One freight train removes 40 HGVs from the road and consumes 20% of the
>fuel.
>Make long distance truck delivery (say over 50 miles) illegal and use road
>vehicles for short drops from strategically placed new railheads built to
>serve the public rather than the shareholders. It's so simple, the
>government couldn't grasp it. The only people to disagree with this are the
>road hauliers with their own pockets to line.

That argument has so many holes in it, it would sink in a small
puddle.

>British rail was far more efficient on a tiny subsidy than the privatised
>cowboys and they killed hundreds less passengers!

Rail transport was great when it was invented nearly 200 years ago. It
put the canals out of business as no government would subsidise them.
Rail would have died out 40 years ago if it were not for the huge
subsidies handed out to rail operators, public or private, willy
nilly.
It still can't compete with non-subsidised road haulage.

Why dont you go and troll elsewhere?

--
ColonelTupperware,
spouting bollocks on Usenet since 1997
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bones

1x employed train driver.
40x unemployed truck drivers!!!.
Abnormal loads on a train???!!!.
"You want 40 very important pallets delivered by 6am".
"We would do sir but you are more than 50 miles away and we would get a
hefty fine from the government.Have you tried british rail ?".

"They won't because they are on strike and there are leaves on the track and
a member of the public has thrown himself on the line"

If you have it,
A truck brought it.

Peter

This of course from a self serving truck driver. No harm in protecting your
corner even if it is to the detriment of everyone else.
The unemployed truck drivers could retrain as train drivers although the
many exams involved may prove too arduous for many!
Regardless of the selfish implications, if a properly run public transport
system was available the truck problem could be slashed dramatically along
with commodity costs.

bones

Whoops!,
Judging by this childish reply(obviously a wannabe politician).I have
offended you Peter by being a mere truck driver who is destroying your
planet and every one and everything that lives on it.
Grow up and live with it,And take your Greenpeace views to a newsgroup where
someone might argue with you, as it seems i was the only one silly enough to
reply.

Roberts

Peter wrote:
> One freight train removes 40 HGVs from the road and consumes 20% of
> the fuel.
> Make long distance truck delivery (say over 50 miles) illegal and use
> road vehicles for short drops from strategically placed new railheads
> built to serve the public rather than the shareholders. It's so
> simple, the government couldn't grasp it. The only people to disagree
> with this are the road hauliers with their own pockets to line.
> British rail was far more efficient on a tiny subsidy than the
> privatised cowboys and they killed hundreds less passengers!
> Peter
What a load of nonsense. Before I retired I worked for the government and we
were made to use the rail to send large items out. It was a disaster nobody
seemed to know when the stuff would arrive and weren't interested in
helping. We lost several items and in the end we had to revert back to
delivering it ourselves. Then at the very least it was possible to sort out
the driver if there were problems. I can remember when each railway station
had its own goods yard but that was stopped and the land sold off or
sometimes converted into a car park. If you have to load the vehicle to go
to the nearest station that will take freight, you might just as well
deliver it it yourself. Then you only have the driver to ask where it went
to if it went missing. It should also be remembered that most rail freight
is moved by diesel powered engines and if you want to see real pollution,
see them working hard. Say near White Waltham on the main line to the
south-east - you would they were steam engines sometimes!
Robert

Ian Rawlings

On 2005-06-19, bones <hectichouse2005@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:

> Judging by this childish reply(obviously a wannabe politician).I
> have offended you Peter by being a mere truck driver who is
> destroying your planet and every one and everything that lives on
> it.

It would be interesting to see what would happen to the haulage
industry if they had to pay road tax in line with the road damage they
cause. The M6 toll road operators don't want trucks on it as they
cause too much damage to the roads as you can see from the state of
the slow lane on our motorways.

I'm not sure what effect removing trucks from the roads would have on
road safety, on the one hand they slow everyone else down to a crawl
so that helps, on the other they tailgate like crazy despite needing
huge distances to stop and most of the accidents I've seen on the A303
have involved a truck despite them not making up anywhere near the
majority of the traffic. I've had one lock up its wheels behind me
because the driver wasn't paying attention and didn't see the
stationary traffic, there are plenty of people who were less
fortunate.

I'm ambivalent about trucks. One the one hand I don't know what
effect restricting them would have as I don't have enough data to make
a proper decision and don't like guessing at it, but on the other hand
I see the mess they leave behind and the chaos they cause and can't
help but think that the rail network, if properly run (fat chance)
would take a lot of the load of the truck network. Sadly given the
state of the rail network I doubt that'll ever happen.

--
For every expert, there is an equal but opposite expert

Paul Brown

Ian Rawlings wrote:

> On 2005-06-19, bones <hectichouse2005@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Judging by this childish reply(obviously a wannabe politician).I
>> have offended you Peter by being a mere truck driver who is
>> destroying your planet and every one and everything that lives on
>> it.
>
> It would be interesting to see what would happen to the haulage
> industry if they had to pay road tax in line with the road damage they
> cause. The M6 toll road operators don't want trucks on it as they
> cause too much damage to the roads as you can see from the state of
> the slow lane on our motorways.
>
They do already pay 10x the roadtax of a PLG vehicle - how much more damage
do they do?

The main reason the inside lane on motorways is so damn trashed is that
*every* truck spends most of its life there, whereas cars all tend to be in
the outer lanes - It's relatively little to do with the individual vehicles
and more to do with the sheer concentration.

P.

Austin Shackles

On or around Mon, 20 Jun 2005 10:20:43 +0100, Paul Brown
<usenet060103@geekstuff.tv> enlightened us thusly:

>They do already pay 10x the roadtax of a PLG vehicle - how much more damage
>do they do?
>
>The main reason the inside lane on motorways is so damn trashed is that
>*every* truck spends most of its life there, whereas cars all tend to be in
>the outer lanes - It's relatively little to do with the individual vehicles
>and more to do with the sheer concentration.

However, there's a worrying trend to fit the semi-trailers with super-single
tyres. These are about 14" wide or more compared with 11" for "normal"
ones, but of course there are only half as many; the weight is thus
concentrated on a smaller area of the road. I see the widest tyre
Bridgestone offer is 445mm, about 17", in fact. Still, 6 of them gives you
102 sq.in. per inch of contact patch - compare this with for example 8x11"
ones, which would be 88, on a tandem axle trailer with twin wheels, it's not
that much better - a twin-wheel tri-axle has an area of 132, so you've lost
30" of area by swapping to super-singes, and that's if you buy the ginormous
ones - if you have the ones that are 14" wide, or thereabouts, you've got
less area from your 6 super-singles than the twin-tandem. Yet the tri-axle
trailer gets you a significant reduction in road fund licence.

They're even worse on narrow roads, as not only is the weight more
concentrated, but it's concentrated right at the edge of the road, where
it's not so strong. The twin-wheel configuration has an overall width of
about 24", with a couple of inches in between the 2 tyres, and spreads the
weight more onto the middle of the road, which ordinarily gets less use.

--
Austin Shackles. www.ddol-las.fsnet.co.uk my opinions are just that
"Quos deus vult perdere, prius dementat" Euripedes, quoted in
Boswell's "Johnson".

Ian Rawlings

On 2005-06-20, Paul Brown <usenet060103@geekstuff.tv> wrote:

> They do already pay 10x the roadtax of a PLG vehicle - how much more
> damage do they do?

Well a quick google with the words "damage road truck car tax" gives a
range of figures for how many cars worth of damage one truck does,
with the figures ranging between 2,000 and 9,600 cars. The figures
are coming from road transport research institutes and local councils
from around the world, and include rolling tests in labs using
stretches of tarmac and car/truck load simulators. Metrics are kind
of hard to judge as the size and type of the road surfaces, cars and
trucks aren't given but it's certainly going to be a whole lot more
than 10x no matter how you paint it.

> The main reason the inside lane on motorways is so damn trashed is
> that *every* truck spends most of its life there, whereas cars all
> tend to be in the outer lanes - It's relatively little to do with
> the individual vehicles and more to do with the sheer concentration.

No, it's to do with the huge amount of damage trucks do to the road.

--
For every expert, there is an equal but opposite expert