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Yet, at €1365 for a container from Germany, it was pricey and demand was weak, so last month, the company suspended the service. Nick Radcliffe, UK sales agent for TX Logistik, said it had to stop at Barking because “it’s as far as you can take a freight train without hitting anything”.Īccording to Radcliffe, by eliminating a sea crossing it would cut the journey time to London from five days to 36 hours each train would remove 38 HGVs from Britain’s overcrowded roads, and each wagon would save a tonne of CO2.

It pulled mega trailers which can be fairly easily hooked up to HGVs at Barking. Then last month, a German rail company, TX Logistik, launched a direct rail freight service to Barking from Cologne, which connects to Italy, Romania and Turkey. Industry sources said it was never more than a political gesture to showcase China’s One Belt, One Road programme.

It took 18 days, half the time of the sea journey, but hopes that it would signal the revival of ancient Silk Road trading routes to the West petered out. In 2017, the first direct rail freight service from China to Britain travelled from Yiwu, a city in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and after a journey of 7,500 miles via Kazakhstan and Poland, delivered its cargo of clothes and white goods to Barking in East London. There have been attempts to take rail freight into Britain, but they have all run into the buffers. HS1, the high speed line between the Channel Tunnel and St Pancras, is capable of taking them, but has weight restrictions and is so expensive that only one freight train a day takes this path.įor the rest, containers bound for the UK are offloaded from trains onto lorries and taken to British customers by road. Tunnels, bridges and station platforms on the conventional railway lines in Kent do not have sufficient clearance for European-sized containers and wagons to continue uninterrupted to London. On May 6, 1994, the Channel Tunnel reconnected Britain and the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age, yet, in the three decades that have elapsed since then, importers and exporters have struggled to capture the prize of direct trade with Continental Europe, and Asia beyond.įreight travels in standard containers and wagons across Europe, but once they emerge from the Channel Tunnel, the problems begin. Could a £10 million revamp of platforms and tunnels fix the squeeze, asks Nicholas Hellen Network Rail’s plan to unblock the Channel Tunnel and get freight back on track​Britain’s rail routes are too narrow for EU cargo trains.