And what was that East - West rail link all about then?
To take container traffic off the roads of course!
Oh but hang on - aren't most of those containers unloaded on the west coast ports and railed across the country only to disappear into the Channel Tunnel or be loaded onto another container ship at an east coast port, because it is cheaper to do so than run the container ship a little further down the west coast and up the channel to one of the main European ports?
I wonder how many go by road on the same journey?
East West rail link was for one specific target only, keep freight out of London, you can't run an intensive passenger service (GEML) whilst dodging around mobile Freightliner chicanes, all passenger stock runs at 100, Freightliner is 75, they're a massive bottle neck. The rail link was imprived over to Bletchley I believe and most traffic from Felixstowe to the Midlands now goes that way and bypasses London. The NLL is chock a block with commuter stock now and Tilbury and more so Gateway are suffering quite badly with that choke point, they can't run up the GEML as that'll just put traffic back where the Rail link took it away. All in all, it's a massive balls up for freight services.
You'll also note the massive new flyover junction north of Peterborough (Werrington) to divert freightliners off the ECML heading north, where it goes after that I'm not sure, my Freightliner Anorak has not be aired for many a year, but it heads up Toward Spalding and Lincoln way.
Regarding port to port transhipments, very little, if any I suspect.
Trans shipments by rail is stupid expensive and a stupid idea that they worked out decades ago; it was a selling point for the chunnel and frankly impractical. Bear in mind a typical feeder can take 1000 TEU (MV Aurora is 1368 TEU capacity), a typical train 50-70 depending on the wagon type.
As far as I know, at Felixstowe we never had any domestic Port to Port transhipments but we had several feeders for UK ports come and go, mostly east coast. There are only two west coast container ports of note, Bristol and Liverpool, Bristol has a low container throughput, it's mostly cars, reefers and bulk. Liverpool has a size able container section but it's goods predominately come from the America's and are destined for the UK, not Europe.
Felixstowe, Tilbury, Gateway and Southampton predominately handle the rest of the world, any transhipments coming from that sector is usually offloaded in Europe, typically Zeebrugge or Cherborg and sail direct up the Irish Sea to Bristol or Liverpool.
Freightliner had one train a day to Tilbury but they were not transhipments AFAIK, that's just where the distribution depot was as the shipper had stopped sailing to Tilbury and decided to come to Felixstowe; sailing down the Thames is to be avoided as it takes so long and Tilbury is limited to smaller vessels.
I've just checked the Felixstowe WTT for 2013-2016 and today
OCEAN and cannot see a single port to port service, I could check the other ports but won't as I'll wager that any traffic will be near zero significance.
If you check shipping arrivals and departures
OCEAN you'll see the one coastal transhipment to Teeside, MV Aurora due 13th Sept but that'll all be vessel to vessel transhipments. That's on top of two trains a day 4E93 & 5E59 going to virtually the same place.
Anyway, we're diluting Phils thread so happy to expand or waffle about all this in my old out and about at work (Port of Felixstowe) thread if folks are interested.
