The total annual cost of providing wagons for coal traffic exceeds the total haulage cost and is about £30 m. a year. The Coal Board have the use of them as bunkers for about 22 million wagon days a year, either at pits or washeries. This, with an allowance for coverage of peak demands, costs the railways about £1 for each wagon supplied, or about £11 m. per year. Under established practice, the Coal Board pay a total demurrage charge of only £1 m. per annum.
It is true that a charge of 2s. 6d. per ton is made to road hauliers by the Coal Board to cover the cost of landsale facilities, and this may be regarded as offsetting the cost to the railways of supplying wagons, but there are two important differences. The road haulier only pays when he moves coal, while the railways have to bear the cost of wagon provision even when the wagons are not in full use. Also, the facility for which the road operator pays is one which is designed to mect his need for quick loading. The railways, on the other hand, do not, in many cases, have their requirements met by being provided with complete trainloads ready for haulage to a single destination as a return to them for the cost of having made wagons available at pits. It should be said, however, that the staff at many pits do help in this respect when they can.
A rather similar situation often exists at the receiving end where wagons are again used for storage while road vehicles are emptied at once. The position is especially bad at the ports.
The degree to which the position is unsatisfactory is made more apparent when consideration is given to the supply to new power stations. To take advantage of new locomotives and make the rail haul more efficient, the sound course is to use large, braked, hopper wagons, which have a better load/tare weight ratio, which can be drawn at high speed, and which can be unloaded very quickly at the receiving terminal. Such wagons are relatively costly, but are much more economical to use if they can be turned round quickly. They are, however, too expensive to be used as storage bunkers at the pits, and need to be loaded quickly from static bunkers.
The Coal Board show understanding of the railways' problem, but it is very understandable that they do not voluntarily spend money for the purpose of providing bunkerage and train loading facilities at pits, all the while the railways provide wagons for use as bunkers without charge. To bring about provision of loading bunkers, and cover the railways' cost of wagoning the pits in the meanwhile, it will be necessary to charge the Coal Board the full cost of wagons retained by them. At present, however, trains of new wagons, capable of making several round trips per day, are being limited to one trip every 2 to 3 days by the absence of quick loading facilities at the pits.
Although the cost of through-train movement of coal is higher than it need be because of terminal conditions, the cost of moving it in single wagon loads to stations and sidings for small consumers is very much higher still. Over a hundred-mile haul, for example, the movement cost is about twice as great; and typical figures for the two different types of movement are shown on the following page. System cost is not included.
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