fodenway:
HRS:
How did the goods get from all the different customers to any of the the stations in question ?.IE rail transport usually involved a road leg in any freight journey either by truck or horse before that other than in the rare case of customers having a dedicated rail terminal on their premises.Morning CF,
In Southampton British rail had there own vehicles to pick up and deliver to customers.
They had quite a few Scarobs with auto couplings. But to be fare a good horse would be a little quicker in some places they delivered to. HarveyObviously, goods had to be taken to and from stations and goods yards by road, which is why the railway companies all had sizeable “road motor” fleets of their own. Ironically, the L.M.S. Railway had the world’s biggest road transport fleet in the 1930’s.
As I said Beeching’s closure of branch lines would have made little if any difference to rail freight’s core activities of moving freight over long distances using the main line network.It just would have meant a small change in the road routing legs of any freight journey.Probably if anything actually increasing efficiency of rail freight by cutting down on the need for marshalling of rail wagons between local branch line and mainline routes.
While holding back road transport,with needless unrealistic dimensions and gross weight limits and the imposition of silly levels of road fuel taxation,was and still is all about the protection of those core rail activeties against competition from long distance road transport operations.