i always trawl the BBC’s web site in the morning to look for thought provoking articles. This one about the latest generation of container ships is fascinating. Describing the capacity of the ship it uses this paragraph.
Each will contain as much steel as eight Eiffel Towers and have a capacity equivalent to 18,000 20-foot containers (TEU).
If those containers were placed in Times Square in New York, they would rise above billboards, streetlights and some buildings.
Or, to put it another way, they would fill more than 30 trains, each a mile long and stacked two containers high. Inside those containers, you could fit 36,000 cars or 863 million tins of baked beans.
It also talks about the knock-on effects of such large ships for ports.
Ship owners also want vessels to be unloaded and loaded within 24 hours, which has various knock-on effects. More space is needed to store the containers in the harbour, and onward connections by road, rail and ship need to be strengthened to cope with the huge surge in traffic.
Felixstowe, which handles 42% of the UK’s container trade, has 58 train movements a day, but plans to double that after it opens a third rail terminal later this year.
Have we got the capacity on the railways to move that large number of boxes?
No!
The next big complaint from the public, will be the noise of freight trains rumbling through their neighbourhood at all hours of the day. The standard freight engines, the Class 66, are not the quietest of beasts.
So for a start, all of the freight routes, like Felixstowe to Nuneaton and Gospel Oak to Barking must be electrified.
But that will only be a stop-gap and we need to put in new lines to the north of the United Kingdom. At least HS2, if it is to be built will be a start.
February 19, 2013
Posted by AnonW |
Transport/Travel | Class 66 Locomotive, Felixstowe, Freight, Ship, Trains |
1 Comment
The head of Ofgem, Alistair Buchanan, is warning that we’re running out of power capacity and that bill will rise. It’s all in this article on the BBC. This is the first few paragraphs.
Consumers are being warned they face higher energy bills as the UK becomes more reliant on energy imports.
In a speech, Ofgem chief executive Alistair Buchanan will say that falls in Britain’s power production capacity are likely to lead to more energy imports and customers paying more.
The energy watchdog predicts power station closures could mean a 10% fall in capacity by April alone.
So what have successive governments over the last ten or so years been doing?
Nothing really, except building useless wind farms.
We should have barraged the Severn, which done properly would create ten percent of our power.
A handful of nuclear power stations would have helped.
As would some gas extracted from fracking, which it seems now, will be the most promising cheap source of energy. Like it or not, we’ve going to have to get fracking! Both the gas and the echnology is there! A few power cuts or higher energy bills, would turn the public’s mind!
We should of course, insulate our houses better. Wouldn’t that create a few jobs too?
My Buchanan has just appeared on the BBC. He talked a lot of sense and we need to see more of him! But the politicians won’t like him, as he’ll make all of them unelectable.
I just sent this e-mail to the BBC.
The public is to blame, as they don’t want generating capacity like the Severn Barrage, wind farms, fracking or nuclear power stations and they continue to want to live in inefficient supposedly beautiful houses. When the bills quadruple and the lights go out, they’ll change their tune.
I suppose it will cure the immigration issue as no-one will want to come here to sit in the dark.
I doubt they’ll read it out.
February 19, 2013
Posted by AnonW |
News | Energy, Fracking, Nuclear Power, Severn Barrage, Wind Power |
2 Comments
The Anonymous Widower 