Air Network

[Navalron]

Firstly, didnt we have mail trains back in the day with 5am starts or whatever? (Forgive me I'm relatively "new" compared to some lol)

We did used to have mail trains, they were the Travelling Post Office trains (probably more commonly known as TPOs). They transported the mail but in addition to transporting the mail, it was also sorted on route (in a few cases down to walk level). Some DOs would collect their mail direct from the stations that the TPOs would call at. I believe that there's also for many years been mail trains (long before the class 325s were introduced) that were purely for transporting mail between big stations.

We never sorted down to walk level on the tpo,s. We sorted down to mail centre, area, district and specials/regs. The only 'local, done was if mail wasn't shagged, was passport offices and government (whitehall) on the up trains to london.

[calum1502]

I'd assume that the new proposals are nothing like this then, just yorks of massive parcels with not enough room to swing a cat lol, just hulking the lot around.

I believe that the proposals are that it's basically everything that currently goes by air within the UK (excluding Northern Island though that could go by ferry instead) would go by rail. I believe that locally probably over 90% of what we get through from other MCs goes by road anyway

It's not a case of sharing the cargo hold, they physically remove all the seats and the cargo containers go into the passenger cabin.

By switching to rail it would eliminate issues such as lithium batteries not being able to go by air and any other "no fly" item

Removing the seats was when we had a contract with Jet 2 .We lost that contract and hasn't happened for about 5years . Royal Mail use cargo only planes now .

[wandle]

Firstly, didnt we have mail trains back in the day with 5am starts or whatever? (Forgive me I'm relatively "new" compared to some lol) So why do they have to be so late now? Not sure exactly what the details are but anything less than overnight running would surely be held up by other carriages right?

Not correct.
You’d be surprised just how much freight passes up & down the West Coast Main Line. The paths are meticulously planned and interwoven with passenger services, all though it frequently goes tits up with late-running and other rare events like the overhead wires being brought down.
Look, for example, at the freight services passing Milton Keynes Central around 5pm - the evening rush hour:
https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search ... wtt&toc=ZZ
One of our 325s was recently a naughty boy

A4EFCBB8-B7C9-4C6E-BE36-C11B1DD1D096.jpeg

[SpacePhoenix]

A trio of 325s coupled together could probably hold just about all the mail that would go by air. I know when I was on our iLSM for a bit last Xmas pressure and we were running 1C, there was only 4 selections that got banded up, the rest were in boxes as they'd be going by road. The outward sort plan doesn't change for Xmas, it stays the same all the time for the outward selections, just the inward selections change as sequencing batches get changed.

You've got the choice of the WCML or the ECML, it'd depend on where RM decided to have their rail hub up north