Its about time they took action on the cowboy trucking companies.

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Originally Posted by Tank

...[pointless rant with no facts]...
You're comparing Europe with Australia, you are joking are'nt you, Regards Frank.

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Driven a truck from Siberia to Portugal lately Frank???

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Originally Posted by Tank

think about how many extra trains and rail lines that would be needed to take over the frieght now hauled by truck. This country doesn't have the population or the revenue (derived from that population) to build the infrastructure to do away with road transport between major centres.

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If you ran passenger services on reinstated freight lines you would open up regional areas.
The suburban rail system here is way past bursting point and needs to shift it's population to regional areas.
And there would be a significant saving on maintenance of the road system.

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Originally Posted by Tank

so next time your lollygagging along a major transport route holding up traffic while your admiring the booger you just picked,

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I've eaten it now so no longer a problem

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Originally Posted by Tank

think about the bloke behind you in a truck trying to earn a living

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The trucks passed me ages ago. They were just behind the young chicky-babes in their little Korean things.

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Originally Posted by isuzutoo-eh

(sorry to pick on your post Frank, i've been doing that a lot lately i am afraid)
Fifty years ago, everything was moved by rail. The joke is now, the joke is the railways can't deliver due to getting run down and selling off the infrastructure till it cannot do its job.
Every station used to have a goods siding, even in suburbia. Towns were built not around roads but around the railways. Roads were built to service the railways. Don't believe it? Check old maps- roads radiate from rail centres. Some towns didn't have road access at all, Tullah in Tas only got a road 40 years after the railway was built, Magnet in Tas never got a road and closed when the mine railway closed. You still can't drive there...
Every conceivable cargo was shipped by rail-livestock, meat, milk, mail, the circus, cement, eggs, grain, fruit, fuel both liquid solid and gas, sugar, army tanks, bricks, steel, manure, pets, water in times of drought, your great grandmother's piano likely arrived by rail unless you lived a few km from the manufacturer. Hell the railways introduced containerised interstate shipping to Australia. Minimum quantity one postcard.
If the trucks stop, the railways could, if given a fighting chance, take up the slack. Not overnight, that is impossible. But trucks aren't Australia's saviour as some seem to think.
Funny enough if the trains stop, most of us wouldn't have electricity and so wouldn't be able to argue the point at all. Not like trucks have a hope in hell of moving the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of coal that the railways can per day.

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Mark, speaking of old maps I recently bought a road map of NSW printed in 1932, I reckon I could name a thousand or more towns on this map that is miles and miles from anything that even looks like a rail line. after the first World War and during the depression a few State governments put unemployed men to work building a rail infrastructure, but they realised the folly and most were abandoned. For example a rail connection between Mudgee and Dubbo, they built the base, a few bridges and filled in a few culverts and that was it, never a rail laid or a train rolled.
As I said Australia doesn't have the population to support rail infrastructure Australia wide, if the yanks cant support rail how are we supposed to.
An example (and quite a common occurence), a 40ft refrigerated container with half a load of frozen meat for export was supposed to picked up at Gunnedah and delivered by rail to Mudgee abbatoir, which also has a rail spur, where the container would be loaded full. This container was then supposed to be delivered to CTAL Botany for shipping overseas, with about $2 million worth of meat.
Our rail system picked up the container a railed it to Brisbane where the half load of meat rotted away.
I get a call from Mugee Abb. to pick up a 40ft. Reefer and deliver it to Mudgee I was there by 9am, then proceeded to Gunnedah by back roads and loaded the other half of the load.
So now instead of having to deliver the load to CTAL Botany I was directed to take the load to Melbourne, as the ship it was supposed to go on had sailed from Sydney to melbourne. It had to be there by 6am the next morning and it was, I was payed well for my trip and was given a $1000 bonus (26 years ago). That company never used rail again and if I had not got that box of meat on that ship, the Abb. would have lost a $50million dollar contract and 200 men would have been out of work.
The rail system has no credibility, cannot be relied on and has sent more companies to the wall than you can poke a stick at. Also you will find that if all the coal trucks stopped deliveries to power stations then the electricity would go out a lot sooner.
You may not remember 30 odd years back when trucks blockaded and stopped hauling, I can remember having to queue for hours to get petrol and only $2 at a time, it would be catastrophic now days, Regards Frank.

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Originally Posted by isuzurover

Driven a truck from Siberia to Portugal lately Frank???

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WTF you were talking about Germany and Switzerland, how does Siberia enter the equation FFS, Regards Frank.

The question I have are who are the rogues/cowboys? The people setting the deadlines and delivery schedule/customer demanding it or the operators meeting it?

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Originally Posted by isuzurover

OK, so attacking the author with no substantive criticisms. Is that because you can find no problems with the method/numbers.

And your next post is a lengthy rant with no facts...

Rail is heavily utilised in Germany and Switzerland for freight that would otherwise be taken by road.

The fact is that more utilisation of rail freight makes far more sense in countries like AU with a highly centralised population than it does in decentralised companies like Germany.

In fact - if we take a leaf out of Germany's book and limit trucks to 80km/h (maybe not across the nullarbor and up the west coast), I would bet that would decrease the accident rate (or at least severity!) and move more freight onto rail. (how's that for an equally unsubstantiated claim to balance things out).

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So Ben, there are lots of facts out there, a couple that I can come up with is that the "land area of Germany is 134,622 sq miles" (a little over 1 1/2 times the area of Victoria) and another "Germany has a population of over 82 million" and you use that country as an example to justify the efficiency or rail as the major distributor of freight in Australia.

To me it doesn't make sense that the cost of rail infrastructure in a continent of 2,966,368 sq miles is an efficient use of financial resources for a population of 22 million, particularly when we will still need roads and road transport resources to deliver the rail freight from the rail head to the customer where ever they may be.

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Originally Posted by Nero

The question I have are who are the rogues/cowboys? The people setting the deadlines and delivery schedule/customer demanding it or the operators meeting it?

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Thanks Nero

About time this thread got off the rails and back onto the topic.
The cowboys in the system really are the consumer that will only pay as little as possible for their produce, but to be fair, the article they pick up off the supermarket shelf, doesn't have a freight price component displayed.

So who is the cowboy? The issue is that we are all responsible, for creating a system that where cheats' win, over the the orderly transfer of goods and services and against a fair return to the supplier of those goods and services.
.

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Originally Posted by wrinklearthur

Thanks Nero

About time this thread got off the rails and back onto the topic.
The cowboys in the system really are the consumer that will only pay as little as possible for their produce, but to be fair, the article they pick up off the supermarket shelf, doesn't have a freight price component displayed.

So who is the cowboy? The issue is that we are all responsible, for creating a system that where cheats' win, over the the orderly transfer of goods and services and against a fair return to the supplier of those goods and services.
.

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Yep.

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Originally Posted by Tank

Mark, speaking of old maps I recently bought a road map of NSW printed in 1932, I reckon I could name a thousand or more towns on this map that is miles and miles from anything that even looks like a rail line. after the first World War and during the depression a few State governments put unemployed men to work building a rail infrastructure, but they realised the folly and most were abandoned. For example a rail connection between Mudgee and Dubbo, they built the base, a few bridges and filled in a few culverts and that was it, never a rail laid or a train rolled.
As I said Australia doesn't have the population to support rail infrastructure Australia wide, if the yanks cant support rail how are we supposed to.
An example (and quite a common occurence), a 40ft refrigerated container with half a load of frozen meat for export was supposed to picked up at Gunnedah and delivered by rail to Mudgee abbatoir, which also has a rail spur, where the container would be loaded full. This container was then supposed to be delivered to CTAL Botany for shipping overseas, with about $2 million worth of meat.
Our rail system picked up the container a railed it to Brisbane where the half load of meat rotted away.
I get a call from Mugee Abb. to pick up a 40ft. Reefer and deliver it to Mudgee I was there by 9am, then proceeded to Gunnedah by back roads and loaded the other half of the load.
So now instead of having to deliver the load to CTAL Botany I was directed to take the load to Melbourne, as the ship it was supposed to go on had sailed from Sydney to melbourne. It had to be there by 6am the next morning and it was, I was payed well for my trip and was given a $1000 bonus (26 years ago). That company never used rail again and if I had not got that box of meat on that ship, the Abb. would have lost a $50million dollar contract and 200 men would have been out of work.
The rail system has no credibility, cannot be relied on and has sent more companies to the wall than you can poke a stick at. Also you will find that if all the coal trucks stopped deliveries to power stations then the electricity would go out a lot sooner.
You may not remember 30 odd years back when trucks blockaded and stopped hauling, I can remember having to queue for hours to get petrol and only $2 at a time, it would be catastrophic now days, Regards Frank.

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The completed section of the Great Western Railway west of Winton was ripped up during the depression as make work. The GWR has never been built.

You don't need to tell me about stupid actions by railways. We used to ship Land Rovers from Moolabin or Rocklea yards in Brisbane to many of the country dealers by rail. We had to take note of the wagon numbers ourselves as without the wagon number the railways had no chance of tracing a missing consignment. We had to be able to tell them their wagon number. The destination was on the LH windscreen in large print. Still, QR managed to deliver a car consigned to Rooke Motors, Cloncurry to Western Garage, Mt. Isa, who, recognising a windfall, promptly sold it and waited for someone to contact them. On another occasion an LR consigned to Cairns Motors was off-loaded in Rockhampton. QR contacted UK motors in Rocky to tell them there was an LR for them. They were not expecting one so went and had a look. Rocky then 'phoned me to tell me that they had taken a vehicle that didn't belong to them into protective custody. "QR didn't seem to know what to do with it, thought it must be ours as we are the local dealer." This in spite of 3" high letters detailing the destination on the windscreen. This vehicle had been lost in the QR system for four weeks.

I don't know if things have improved since those days but it was not unusual for rail consignments to the far flung reaches of Queensland to take weeks to make a journey that was only a few days by road transport.

Back off the tracks for a second with a silly point.
Anyone living near a heavy freight line lately may have noticed that the locos have changed their paint jobs a while back. A new paint job usually means a new owner.
Look up Pacific National, a name you will see on a lot of heavy haul locos on the eastern states and lo and behold..... Owned by Toll-Patricks, a combination of a truck company and a port handling company, and that is only one example. You might be quite surprised at who actually owns what in the rail industry!
Sort of makes one wonder about rail replacing road transport doesn't it.
Regards
Glen