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 Where desired, and where justified by the volume and regularity of traffic flow, trains of wagons tailored to the special requirements of customers will be operated as timetabled trains.

Liner Trains

Although sundry references have been made to Liner Trains in earlier sections, the nature of this form of service has not, so far, been described.

The Liner Train concept is described more fully in Appendix 4. It has not yet been developed quite to the point where proposals for the establishment of a national network of Liner Train services can be put forward as a firm project, sufficiently detailed to justify capital expenditure, but enough scheme work has been done to show its promise. More thorough market research is going on now, side by side with route selection, studies of depot design and location, and more reliable costing.

The basic idea is to combine road and rail movement in such a way as to take advantage of the low cost of fast through-train movement as the means of providing trunk haulage over medium to long distances, for flows of traffic which, though dense, are composed of consignments too small in themselves to justify through-train operation, and to do so without the disadvantages of either costly assembly of trains by wagon-load movement on rail, or costly transfer of merchandise between road and rail vehicles.

The method proposed for doing this is to link main centres of industry and population by services of fast, regularly scheduled, through-running trains. These trains would be composed of specially designed, permanently coupled, low, flat wagons capable of taking large containers of the newly recommended international cross section of 8 ft. by 8 ft. with length modules of 10, 20 and 30 ft. They would operate in shuttle services between main centres, or over circuits linking a number of centres, and would remain continuously coupled as trains. Containers, loaded at the point of origin of the freight, would be brought to special depots feeding the services by flat-decked road vehicles, or by pickup on rail where conditions made that favourable, and would then be transferred to the Liner Train. At the receiving depot, the procedure would be reversed.

A key to the success of this type of operation is quick safe transfer of containers from one vehicle to another, and feasibility and cost studies have been made of a number of possible ways of doing it. Several methods are satisfactory, and choice will depend to a large extent upon the levels of traffic which depots and services are expected to handle.

The advantages offered by this form of service are:—

Fast through working of trains to cheapen the trunk haul. Containers designed for easy loading by forklift trucks through full-width end and side doors. Elimination of the expensive double handling associated with the transfer of non-containerised freight from road to rail, and vice versa. Elimination of expensive wagon movement on rail to assemble freight from small terminals into trains. Elimination of marshalling and absence of all shunting shocks. Fast, reliable, scheduled delivery.