Havn't read the whole thread but directed here as a result of my 'earlier Ro-ro and containerisation thread'....
Building the Steam Navy, Dockyards, Technology and the Creation of the Victorian battle Fleet 1830 – 1906 by David Evans.
Page 170
Another far sighted plan, this time for containerised transport of coal to the yards, was submitted in December 1846 by the solicitors to the Bristol & Poole harbour railway, who having a floating dock at their Bristol terminus:
…by which means their iron Barges containing the Boxes with Welch Steam Coals...will be placed on the Line and conveyed without shifting, or break of gauge direct to Her Majesty’s Stores either at Gosport or Portsmouth or by means of a Pier alongside of which a Steam Ship may lie and the Coals be placed at once on board – affording thereby a continuous supply of Best Steam Coals in first-rate conditions…
They had submitted a scheme to supply 21,000 tons annually to Mr Russell, contractor for supply of coals at Southampton for the Great Western Steam Navigation Company, the P & O Steam navigation Company, and the Royal West India mail Company, and to the Engineer in chief of the last. And they had agreed to support the plan. There would be a small increase in price, but this would be compensated for by the excellent condition of the coal. This offer was not taken up.
Now this suggest that containerisation could have been introduced far far sooner. There would be less theft and 'damages' which would be of interest to the merchants.
Ro-Ro type vessels were around a lot sooner than the trans Atlantic type Ro-Ro but only on short service type but how sooner could they have been introduced. For that matter, what kind of service could coastal type Ro-Ro provide if introduced sooner.
Same goes for coastal container ship type services - i've seen an interesting Sunday Times document recently that suggests coastal containership services could be very beneficial wrt congestion.
Britain’s congested roads will soon be further flooded by freight. So why don’t we carry everything by river and sea? Richard Girling reveals the transport masterplan that has been far from plain sailing
<img alt="" border="0" height="5" width="1"> A newly hatched coot chick, limp teaspoonful of saturated feather and weightless bone, sprawls on the surface of Waterworks River. Seventy miles away, the 66,433-tonne Chinese container ship Xin Yan Tai, 280 metres long and carrying the equivalent of 5,688 lorryloads, nestles into its berth at Felixstowe, while drivers on the A12, A14, M3, M25, M1, A1 and M6 check the traffic news.
For the coot, now bucking in the wake of British Waterways’ 150-horsepower rigid inflatable boat, there is a miracle. The helmsman, soft of heart as he is craggy of feature, kills the throttle, scoops up the barely alive morsel and returns it to the reeds. For everyone else, it’s business as usual. Felixstowe’s cranes pluck like ravens at the ship’s innards. Traffic on the M3, M25 and M6 closes up, stops, starts and stops again. Such is the UK’s “integrated transport policy” – so good you have to queue for it.
What connects the hatchling to the ocean giant and the clogged motorways is our peculiar ambivalence to our greatest national asset, and a transport system whose presiding geniuses are habit, expediency and chaos. If globalism has a downside, then this is it. Decisions crucial to our quality of life are being dictated not in the mutant, stakeholder English of the UK government but in unfamiliar languages from foreign boardrooms.
The reasons are simple: world trade is dominated by container ships whose statistics are beyond the ken of anyone who thinks aircraft carriers are big. Even the Xin Yan Tai is no contender for the record books. The biggest ship ever to put in at Felixstowe was the 106,700-tonne Xin Los Angeles, also Chinese-owned, which stretches 337 metres from end to end and can hold 9,560 20ft-long freight containers (or 9,560 lorries’ worth). At its Trinity and Landguard terminals, the port altogether operates nine container berths. Eight of the 10 ships that docked there on the same day as Xin Yan Tai were bigger than the Royal Navy’s flagship, the aircraft carrier Invincible.
Owners of such colossi will never run them inefficiently. They want maximum cargoes, direct routes and no hanging about for tides or berths. There is no time for diversions into remote backwaters such as the North Sea. Felixstowe and Southampton may be convenient stop-offs on routes to Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg, but in any language (and especially Chinese) a 250-mile detour to the Tees is nonsensical. If there is no berth available in the south, then they’ll steam straight on to Rotterdam, and the UK can fetch what it needs from there. Hence the concentration of deep-water container berths in what planners call the GSE – the greater southeast – and the scramble to build a whole lot more.
Hence, too, anxiety in the GSE as it anticipates yet more pressure on its overloaded roads, and the clamour from the Freight Transport Association for yet more tarmac. Meanwhile, one of the most brilliantly engineered trading networks in the history of commercial enterprise – Britain’s inland waterways – has been reborn as a linear holiday resort and our coastal waters are ignored. The harder you look at it, the crazier it gets.
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Waterworks River is part of a nearly forgotten web of backwaters, the Bow Back Rivers, following the course of the River Lea north of its confluence with the Thames, which was once east London’s main commercial artery. Never pretty, it drew to its banks the kind of bad-neighbour industries – scrap metal, garbage, chemical works, car breakers’ yards, sewerage – that were unwanted anywhere else (though it also had three handsome mills and a gin distillery). Its concrete banks were last reinforced in the 1930s and barge traffic had mostly petered out by the 1950s.
For all but four hours of the day it’s now all but unnavigable. When the tide turns, it drains right down to the mud (sometimes houseboats get so firmly stuck in it, they are unable to rise on the flood and are overwhelmed). Wherever you look, there is something abandoned, swinging on its hinges or scabbed with corrugated iron. Even the buddleia and Japanese knotweed bursting through the banks appear to extinguish life rather than embrace it. And yet, in a multiplicity of ways, these are rivers of hope.
The half-dead coot made its first attempt to swim right next to the designated site of the 2012 Olympic aquatic centre. Waterworks River and the Old River Lea, into which it transmutes at Stratford, will be the design focus of the Olympic Park, wellspring of a reinvented, self-confident East End. The banks will be terraced; river bed cleared; bridges removed or realigned; new ones built. In all but grid reference it will become an entirely new place, delivered from another planet.
But that is not why British Waterways wants to show it off. The revival of Waterworks River need not be just a landscaper’s dream. There is real work for it to do. The construction of the Olympic site – stadium, velodrome, aquatic centre, basketball and hockey venues, the athletes’ village, food halls, roads and vehicle parks – will require a small mountain of aggregates, asphalt, cement, steel, glass, wood and concrete, thousands upon thousands of lorryloads that, in the Blackwall tunnel and on east London’s already log-jammed streets, would guarantee gridlock. The salving balm, green as you like, is the waterway system.
What the Bow Back Rivers were in the past, they can be again. All that’s needed is a £15m lock on Prescott Channel (no, it’s nothing to do with that Prescott), and for the first time in 40 years the level above Three Mills Island can be controlled and the navigation reopened. This is the plan, which now waits only upon a funding package that British Waterways hopes to wrap up shortly. The lock would enable the passage, two at a time, of 350-tonne barges, each the equivalent of 14 25-tonne lorries. Richard Rutter, BW’s regeneration manager, calculates that the overall saving would be at least 100,000 road journeys at greatly reduced cost and minimal noise and pollution. After the Olympics, the river will make an ideal exit path for east London’s garbage – another 250,000 tonnes a year taken off the roads. It is, as Rutter puts it, “a no-brainer”, and the only puzzle is why water transport was not made a planning condition in the first place.
In continental Europe, waterways have never been swallowed by “heritage”. You would never hear a German say – as an official of British Waterways (not Rutter) said to me – that advocates of waterborne freight were “romantics”. Nor would you stand on a bridge over the Rhine, as I did above the Thames at Westminster, and see nothing but tour boats. In Germany, 64.3% of freight travels by waterway; in the UK, less than 1% does.
Sadly, there seem to be some people within the now leisure-dominated waterways industry who won’t cheer too hard for the Bow Backs in case they are seen as a precedent.
As recently as 1995-6, 3.7m of freight was carried this way, but much of this was coal. With coal out of the picture, the figure slumped to 1.6m in 2004-5, though it crept up again to 1.8m last year. This was due mainly to the aggregate company Cemex, which began using barges to carry sand and gravel on the River Severn. All you need to make sense of this is basic numeracy. Each barge carries the equivalent of more than 20 lorryloads but uses only a fiftieth of the fuel needed by a single lorry. Cemex’s barges on the Severn will save 34,000 road journeys a year.
But the Severn is a very different proposition from, say, the Kennet and Avon Canal. British Waterways’ enthusiasm for the project is real but muted. Restoring the freight-carrying potential of a river or canal, it says, is hugely expensive, and its pockets far from deep. A spokesman slams down the figures like a “position closed” shutter at the bank. “In 2005-6 we received an income of £500,000, compared to £600,000 in the previous year. When you consider that last year we invested £107m in maintaining the waterways – repairing structures, dredging the channels, managing vegetation – the earned income is minuscule by comparison. BW is willing, but it can’t do everything.”
A few other bits and pieces are in prospect – a new wharf for handling waste at a recycling centre in west London; a contract to move incinerator ash on the River Ouse; a government grant to refurbish a couple of barges for aggregates on the Aire and Calder navigation and the Trent. Worthy, yes. But an exciting glimpse into a dynamic new future for water transport? Yawn.
Government policy, not untypically, is Janus-faced. If lip service did any good, then inland and coastal waters would be churning with freight, and the motorways would have reverted to their primary purpose as fast nonstop highways. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the Department for Transport (DfT) and the House of Commons transport committee have all called for a transfer of freight from road to water. They might just as well have called for powers of levitation. In 2002 the DfT announced a “water-preferred policy” for abnormal indivisible loads (AILs) – the giant turbines, transformers and other industrial hulks that straddle multiple lanes and reduce entire motorways to the speed of a pensioner with a shopping trolley.
For a while it looked promising. An £8.5m government grant enabled the transport engineers Wynns to develop the Terra Marique, a huge pontoon capable of carrying loads of up to 1,200 tonnes around the coast and into river mouths. This was launched in 2004 with a 400-tonne daughter vessel, the Inland Navigator, which it could carry inside and release into estuaries, thus extending its reach as far inland as Leeds, Maidenhead, Nottingham, Rotherham, Worcester and York. It seemed the freight industry had received into its sclerotic heart a life-saving shot of ice-cold rationality. But then what is rationality when set against faith in the great god MacAdam?
In July this year the House of Commons transport committee rebuked that faith’s high priesthood in the Highways Agency. “The ‘water preferred’ policy,” it said, “does not appear to be encouraging more freight onto the inland waterways as intended… Little real effort has been made to divert freight off the roads and onto the water… Indeed, we have received evidence that the Agency’s own policies are working in the other direction.”
The blockades to progress are economic self-interest and inertia. On the one hand, the freight industry complains that water transport is more expensive than road. On the other, the water lobby argues that the real cost of road transport far exceeds what hauliers pay in tax. Taking into account congestion, pollution and accidents, the DfT’s own figures suggest that every road mile of freight costs 51p to the public purse, which adds up to very big numbers indeed. In 2005 alone, the 430,000 HGVs on Great Britain’s roads clocked up 13.9 billion miles (22.23 billion kilometres), swallowing £7 billion worth of invisible public subsidy. But this cuts no ice with company accountants. They may “look at” the water option but they seldom take it. In two years, Terra Marique and Inland Navigator have never worked as they were designed to do, as mother and daughter. Operating independently, Navigator has made just three paid-for trips, carrying electricity transformers from Goole to Newark.
Terra Marique has done better – ferrying a complete Concorde from the Thames to Scotland for the Scottish Museum of Flight, and 19 other coastal trips carrying electricity-generating equipment for National Grid. Even so, it has been running at only 66% capacity.
Historically the problem for water has been the lack of a Big Voice to set against the road lobby. In 2003 the DfT itself tried to tilt the balance by backing Sea and Water, a new campaigning body based in London. But don’t expect any nationwide advertising blitz. S&W’s income – £120,000 a year from government and £60,000 from industrial sponsors – won’t stretch much further than running the office and paying its three full-time staff. A measure of the scandal (for scandal it is) is that it’s hard-pressed even to crystallise its own vision. Defining any kind of transport policy is like navigating in a fog with the radar switched off. Somewhere over the horizon, Utopia lurks. But you don’t know where. You are starved of facts. So devout is the faith in MacAdam that, despite the self-evident truth that road transport in the long term will throttle itself to death, the government has made very little effort to push the alternative.
The bigger the question, the unlikelier it is to be answered. What proportion of freight could be switched to water? How many lorries would this take off the roads? How long would it take? How much might the government be prepared to invest to make it happen? Who knows?
The DfT certainly doesn’t, and there is nobody else with the will or the resources to find out. “Nobody is putting up the money to get that knowledge,” says Sea and Water’s director, Heather Leggate, who is left having to talk in general terms about “a lot of potential”. Crucially, too, it means it is impossible to work out accurate like-for-like cost comparisons between road and water, without which the case for water cannot be proved. (Ironically, the DfT assures me at the same time that it is “funding Sea and Water to… identify all existing research on the potential for water freight… and identify knowledge gaps…”) Where, then, is the vision? Britain’s coastal waters are variously described as a “conveyor belt” or “ring road” – zero maintenance, uncloggable, environmentally friendly (60% less carbon emissions per tonne/kilometre than road transport) and free.
From rivers like the Thames, Severn, Mersey, Ouse, Humber, Tees and Clyde, it has access to a network through which modern vessels can reach inland towns and cities. Yet it’s one of the emptiest ring roads on the planet. In 2004, 120.5m tonnes of freight was hauled from southern to northern England by road or rail, and just 8.2m tonnes, or 6%, by sea. “It concerns us,” says Heather Leggate, “that two-thirds of the containers coming into Southampton will be delivered by road north of Birmingham. To us that seems absolutely ridiculous. We are trying to encourage more transhipment around the coast to ports which at the moment are underused. There are 300 commercial ports in the UK, so that’s a lot of potential.”
To her the solution is obvious – a “feedering” service of smaller ships ferrying containers from southern hubs to the north, whence they would finish their journeys by road. David Cheslin, the chairman of Coastlink Network, a campaigning body for shipping professionals, is promoting the idea of a daily service up the North Sea coast from the Thames or Felixstowe, and up the west coast from Southampton. One small ship alone would carry 300 standard-size containers, so two on each route would take 1,200 off the road every day, plus 1,200 return journeys no longer needed. Suitable vessels are available for charter, and the need for infrastructure would be minimal. Unlike the mega-ships, which draw up to 15 metres of water, coasters need no more depth than an old-fashioned collier. All it takes is a bit of vacant quayside and a mobile crane.
Cheslin concedes that such a service at first would not be fully utilised, and so would not be profitable from day one: “It would need some government subsidy but it wouldn’t be enormous, certainly not compared with the cost of building a mile of motorway. It would build up volume to make it viable, and could be self-sustaining in six or 12 months.” Thereafter it could expand to three, five, maybe even 10 ships a day. “We could run as many container services as you like.”
I put this to Andrew Traill, until recently head of rail, maritime and air cargo policy for the Freight Transport Association. He was not enthusiastic. The problem, he says, is “a lack of companies willing to invest. They won’t do it without a long-term guarantee of volume”. As switching from road to sea would mean a 20% increase in customers’ freight bills, such guarantees would be a long time coming.
But the added cost is not the will of God. John Ford, director of operations for the Felixstowe office of the shipping agents Johnson Stevens, explains how the system is slanted towards road. “The ports charge a fixed handling cost of £75 or £80 per container. This includes lifting it from ship to quay, and lifting it again onto a lorry. But it does not include lifting onto a railway wagon or other ship, which carries an extra charge of £40-£50. With a further charge at the destination port, it puts up the cost by £100 a container.” All this would be solved by switching to the continental system – one charge for delivery to the quay and a separate one for lifting onto any other vehicle, be it lorry, train or ship, so that sea and rail users don’t pay over the top for a road service they don’t use. “That would level the playing field.”
The practicality of feeder servicing has been shown over the past three years by the do-it-yourself chain B&Q. In the past it used to truck imports for its northern distribution centres all the way up to Warrington, Scunthorpe, Doncaster and Worksop from Southampton. Now, in the absence of any regular feeder service from the south, it transships from Rotterdam into Immingham. Result: an annual saving of 6m road miles. It works.
The slow pace of a ship is not an issue. Most of the stuff heading in and out of British ports – 438m tonnes of it in 2004 – is basic raw materials: oil, chemicals, petrol, coal, ores, liquefied gases, timber, grains and feedstuffs. “Finished” goods include vehicles, food, iron and steel, building materials, machinery, shoes, clothing, computers, “white goods”, televisions, furniture, books, carpets – you name it. Pretty much anything you can lay a hand on is shipped in or out in some form or other. But very little of it is perishable (and even perishables can ride in refrigerated containers). Once the conveyor is running, journey times are irrelevant. A daily delivery is a daily delivery, never mind how long the load has been on the road or at sea. And what makes sense for imports must equally make sense for domestic deliveries within the UK. Heading south on the M1, you’ll see trucks driving from Aberdeen to London. Aberdeen! A seaport! Where is the sense in spending two days clogging the roads with expensive lorries when you could load the stuff straight onto a ship?
But John Ford is under no illusion that transport is a forum in which the best argument always wins. “People get set in their ways,” he says. “Nothing will be done until the system gridlocks. The government doesn’t have the will.” For all these reasons, Sea and Water has some heavy weather ahead. The Freight Transport Association has joined up as a member, but it looks more like infiltration than wholehearted support. “They will say to you,” says Heather Leggate, “that we are anti-road.” (She’s dead right – that’s exactly what they do say, and with the implication that it disqualifies Sea and Water from grown-up debate.) British Waterways has also signed up, but – Bow Backs apart – they are more likely to sell wharves for redevelopment than they are to reopen them for trade. In the words of one industry insider, this is “like running a railway without stations”.
Nobody, and certainly not Leggate, believes the ocean giants can disgorge straight onto the old narrowboat system. You might as well expect an airbus to land on a grass aerodrome in the Weald, or the Arctic Monkeys to take up the shawm. There may be an increased role for canals in carrying aggregates and waste, but the real, pragmatic thrust is towards the sea.
Leggate’s discipline is economics, not romance. By day she is director of the Centre for International Transport Management at London Metropolitan University, and she is an adviser on ports policy to the House of Commons transport committee. This means she is uniquely placed to recognise the disconnection in policy. “DfT don’t seem to talk to Defra,” she says, “and they don’t seem to talk to the Department for Communities and Local Government. We’ve been fighting quite hard to achieve an integrated approach, and we feel strongly that there should be some sort of water freight or transport group that crosses government departments. Transport is not just an issue for DfT. It’s an environmental issue, and it’s an issue for the regions. We really need to achieve joined-up thinking, but we’re finding that very, very difficult.”
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The difficulty is about to become even more acute. Faced with dire warnings about the cost to “UK plc” if container capacity in the south falls short of Chinese demands, the government has agreed to a brand-new container port in Bathside Bay, Harwich, and an extension of its near neighbour, Felixstowe. It has also said it is “minded to” approve a new port on the site of the old Shell Haven refinery on the Thames estuary near Stanford-le-Hope. All three are not just in the southeast but in the same county, Essex, and all are foreign-owned. P&O Ports, developer of Shell Haven, was taken over earlier this year by Dubai Ports World. Bathside and Felixstowe are owned by the Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa. (Most of the rest, including Southampton and Immingham, belong to Associated British Ports, which was taken over this summer by a consortium led by the American bankers Goldman Sachs.)
All three schemes involve rail improvements for which the port owners themselves must pay, but this will do little to alleviate pressure on the roads. According to the DfT, an “acceptable” freight share for rail at these ports is just 25%, and there is an ambition to crank up water’s share to a meagre 10%. All the rest will hit the tarmac. Shell Haven alone would handle the equivalent of 3.5m containers a year, which stacks up to 9,615 every day. Using the DfT’s own formula, this means 6,250 extra loads on the A13. Felixstowe will add another 1.5m to its current annual total of 2.7m, and Bathside Bay will pile another 1.7m on top of that. Whether even this will be enough is a matter of conjecture. The DfT is conducting a policy review which, for as long as it continues, renders its officials mute. “It would be premature to speculate at this stage on what conclusions the review will reach,” was all it would say when asked how long the planned new capacity would suffice.
Before gridlock eventually forces the government’s hand, the best shot in sanity’s locker is road pricing. There is no argument about whether or not it will happen. The DfT is committed to it, and both road and sea lobbies have pledged their support. Their motives, however, are very different. Sea and Water is pushing for hauliers to pay the full cost of their impact on the roads. “Certain [sea] routes,” says Heather Leggate, “aren’t competitive because road users don’t pay the full cost. And when road pricing comes in, I think water will become more competitive. We’re trying to get the DfT to look at this and level the playing field. There are grants available for start-up operations, but really in the long term they’re only sustainable if road users pay the full cost.”
It’s this kind of talk that makes the transport industry gag on its Yorkie bar. “We support road pricing,” says the Freight Transport Association’s Andrew Traill, “so long as it’s cost-neutral.” In other words, they don’t object to a change in the way road use is taxed, provided it doesn’t cost any more. In their opinion the main benefit would be to catch foreign drivers who currently use British roads for free. “What we have a problem with,” says Traill, “is that there are too many people around that organisation [Sea and Water] who see road freight as a whipping boy. They want to put up road freight costs so that everyone goes to them. By all means find alternatives, but don’t punish road freight and drive it out of business. If that happened, all the prices in the shops would go up. Economic growth would stop and you’d drive business down the drain. What’s the point of that?”
This is an old, old tune, played whenever hauliers perceive a threat to their interests. They play it despite the fact that road congestion, which the new port developments will surely make worse, already costs UK industry £20 billion a year, and that pouring more and more money into roads is not the answer – history has shown that traffic simply grows to fill the space, with no advantage gained. I ask Traill about recent hold-ups on one of the routes to Felixstowe, and the answer rings like a knell.
“The A14 gets very congested at times,” he agrees. “The solution is to increase the number of lanes and upgrade it to a motorway.”
HOW OUR WATERWAYS COULD WORK FOR US
This is how Britain could use its coastal waters and its canals and rivers — one of the most brilliantly engineered trading networks in history — to carry freight and prevent the nation’s road network from becoming choked by HGVs. The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the Department for Transport and the House of Commons transport committee have all called for a transfer of freight from tarmac to water — but is anybody listening?
HOW ONE COMPANY DID IT
The benefits of switching bulk freight from road to water have been amply demonstrated by Cemex, a leading manufacturer of cement, ready-mix concrete and other building materials. Every year the company shifts 275,000 tonnes of sand and gravel on the River Severn from its quarry at Ripple to a processing plant at Ryall in Worcestershire. In 10 years it will save 340,000 lorry journeys, at huge benefit to the company’s fuel costs and impact on the environment, and its endeavours will contribute to government targets to divert 3.5% of all road freight to the waterways. It makes economic, and ecological, sense: the fuel used in road journeys is 50 times greater than the amount needed to shift the same load by water. Put another way, this means the fuel previously used by HGVs in a single week is enough for barges doing the same work to run for a whole year. It is for this reason, and to relieve the pressure of freight on the roads, that campaigners are now calling for more industrial development on land that can be served by water.
CONGESTION CHANGE
While our waterways are being underused, Britain’s roads are becoming increasingly congested. According to the Department for Transport, road freight is growing at an annual rate of 2.5% per year. Domestic freight transport on our roads has increased by around 60% in the past 20 years. In 1986, 105 billion tonnes of goods were transported by road; today it is more than 160 billion tonnes.
WATER POWER: THE FACTS
The UK offers 11,072 miles of coastline, connected to more than 300 commercial ports and 2,000 miles of freight-carrying estuaries, rivers and other inland waterways.
95% of freight (by volume) and 75% (by value) is moved to or from Britain by water.
In 2004, 573m tonnes of cargo was handled in the UK — an increase of 3% from 2003.
Water freight makes up 24% of all freight (in tonne kilometres) moved within the UK.
Carbon emissions are reduced by 80% when you take freight off the roads and onto water.
Water freight uses significantly less fossil fuel than other modes of transport.
Cory Environmental transports 700,000 tonnes a year — or 15% of Londoners’ household rubbish — along the Port of London Authority-operated River Thames in Essex. By doing so, they remove the equivalent of 100,000 lorry movements a year.
The industry employs more than 200,000, contributing £6.2 billion to the UK economy.