A story for our times....the Ship Canal is being used to ship wine into Manchester for Tesco this taking 700,000 haulage miles off the road
www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1020507_shi...n
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Makes no economic sense really, instead of loading the containers to lorries at Liverpool docks and distributing from there, they are filling Salford full of wagons instead, plus they've created the extra work and expense of loading and unloading the barge! - gimmick that wont last!.
Billy
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I agree, Billy. This is just a PR stunt. The cost of employing a person/2 people (on shifts) to skipper a barge and the extra cost of that compared to a few hours in a truck just don't add up, even if barges don't have tachos. In the olden days barges made sense for non-perishables when labour was cheap and 'ealth n safety allowed operatives to work/live in pretty squalid conditions.
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I bet the people of Salford Quays are happy about an extra zillion Tesco trucks trundling back & forth (not). Unless, of course, the distribution centre has always been there & the loading up at Liverpool onto trucks, then unloading again in Salford has been eliminated by this. If so it looks like a big tick in the green column for Tesco.
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I am also sceptical on how this really pans out environment wise.
Personally I have said for years more could be shipped via the canals mine. Maybe if this was more than a booze cruise to Manchester....
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Looking at the short video in the link, I was appalled by the makeover the surroundings of the MSC seem to have suffered in recent years. Looked more like a holiday development in the middle east than a proper English industrial landscape. I suppose the rot set in even before the philistines demolished the magnificent transporter bridge over the canal at Runcorn...
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Having actually read the report as linked.
The wine is shipped in in containers and bottled in Salford. Previously the wine entered the UK via southern ports not Liverpool and was trucked from there to Salford, bottled then redistributed around the Uk.
Tesco are saving the journeys from the south coast to Salford, the outgoing trucks remain the same so Salford should see fewer lorries not more.
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And with our wine increasingly likely to be English [see original reason for using the canals], they can distribute it directly from the vineyards in due course, or Portsmouth from Sussex anyway.
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So reading the article and seeing the pics, each container equals a lorry. The barge carries a lot of containers that were coming to Salford anyway. So over the week even this is a lot let lorries on our roads. Small compared to the total but makes a difference.
So maybe Tesco have (a) done the political bit but (b) are making a difference albeit small.
I thought it was bringing in goods but it's bulk wine to be bottled.
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So maybe Tesco...... are making a difference, albeit small.
Every little helps. :-)
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Makes no economic sense really instead of loading the containers to lorries at Liverpool
In the article, it says that the shipments normally arrived at "various southern ports", and are transported to "Kingsland Wines and Spirits bottling site". Liverpool ain't southern, and what happens at the bottling plant, I wonder?
If it's Tesco, I suspect that whatever they're doing *will* make "economic sense".
Is it possible to turn this thread around, and instead of finding reasons why things might not work, find reasons why they might?
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In the process of taking trucks off the roads it puts truckers out of work, so it's not all good.
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L\'escargot.
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The Bow Back Waters are being restored/expanded and will be used to ship an extraordinary quantity of stuff for the Stratford Olympic stadium.
BW site refers.
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There's still plenty of trucks on the road. Still prefer less after one ran into our hire car last summer in Italy. Nearly killed us but did enough damage all the same. And that trucker ran into by a tanker....
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There's still plenty of trucks on the road. Still prefer less ..........
I bet you wouldn't say that if you earned your living by being a trucker.
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L\'escargot.
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>>The wine is shipped in in containers and bottled in Salford. Previously the wine entered the UK via southern ports not Liverpool and was trucked from there to Salford, bottled then redistributed around the Uk.<<
So after re-reading the original article i'm still unclear as to whether Tesco are now going to shift all the shipping from the various countries from the Southern ports directly to Liverpool, to unload the wine, then Barge it to Salford, or... are they going to truck it to liverpool from the southern ports, then barge it to Salford from there?
If the Wine is coming in for eg, two containers at dover from chile, a container from Oz at southhampton and three containers on a ship from spain to London, then somebodies with trucks is going to have to go around and gather them up! and deliver them to the barge anyway.
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I wonder if Tesco got a big Govt. grant to implement this?
IMHO its a good idea, a drop in the ocean but hopefully others will follow suit, and take a little bit of pressure off the road network. There will still be plenty of perishable and other time-sensitive goods that require road haulage.
DfT policy statement: snipurl.com/1sdq5
"British Waterways recently announced plans to double the amount of freight on its waterways by 2010 - the equivalent of 64,000 lorry journeys are already carried on their canals and rivers."
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Not having read the article (can't stand Tesco so can't be bothered to read it), but I would think there is quite a high possibility it is being done because of the lack of capacity at the southern ports rather then for any great Green reason!!!! They are also probably getting a nice big subsidy from somewhere if they call it a green issue. Although, it has been said today that shipping is actually a bigger CO2 polluter then aircraft, so maybe they are not being as green as they like to think they are.
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Although it has been said today that shipping is actually a bigger CO2 polluter then aircraft
Not per unit of goods shipped it isn't. Overall, yes, but only because there are many more ships than aircraft. You try moving bulk materials by air!
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You try moving bulk materials by air!
Don't get me wrong, I am all for sea transport, in fact I make a good living because of it (most of my clients do container haulage) - I was merely pointing out that sea transport is not as green as it may be being made out to be!
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Movement of bulk goods via the sea must be better than air though. You can shift massive amounts on water and at relatively low speed. Go too slow in the air... and you won't be in the air.
I'd have driven my next car from the factory if an option. Hiroshima I think where the Mazda6 is punched out ;-)
Seriously I offered to collect the Mazda (100+ miles away despite local dealer less than 2 miles away!) for a reduced price iPod connector... no joy so it comes on a transporter on Monday.
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