cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/534457
Do you think Melbourne should bring them back?
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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As with all things related to public transit, never assume the modern absence is for a good reason. Big car and big oil have spent a century shaping cities for their own benefit.
Freight doesn't move on its own, unlike passengers. For a freight tram to work, it would need to be extremely rapidly loaded and unloaded and not clog up the tracks while loading/unloading or have dedicated sidings which greatly increases infrastructure complexity. Freight trucks & vans have the benefit of being able to park kind of out of the way while a person unloads pallets and dollys of stuff.
Rail freight really makes the most sense for hub-hub movements or for pickup/dropoff of larger quantities of goods, its just too slow to load and unload to make much sense for last mile pickup/delivery in most cases with LCL loads unless its a large enough amount of stuff to warrant a siding, at which point you're at an electric engine picking up and dropping off freight cars so that they can be loaded/unloaded without tying up the engine from moving other freight cars.
I'm sure there's specific usecases where a freight tram would actually make sense, but I imagine most of those usecases would also be better served by a combine tram that does both passenger and freight
Freight trams "only" require a restructuring of how we handle cargo: the way i see it working is using trams to bring goods from the train terminal to small neighbourhood warehouses where it can there be brought to its destination via stuff like cargo bikes.
And of course in some situations (at least in the cities i've seen) you can just add a spur to the back of a store and treat it like a more efficient truck.
All that would do is increase handling effort and make shipping more expensive, with no benefit for companies except maybe greenwashing PR.
Let's try a real world example. From the outskirts of the city where the already mainline railway connected tram shed would be, into the city center. It's about a 45 minute tram trip, for which you'd have to load and unload the cargo on each end.
So, you unload the cargo from the train which takes time, store it in a warehouse. Later load it into the tram, should take about the same time as loading a truck. So far, so good.
But instead of just delivering the cargo to your customer directly, you drive it to another more central warehouse using the tram.
You unload the cargo again, and once again have to store it in a very expensive warehouse in the city center., until you can distribute it to cargo bikes. Which once again means handling the cargo.
Only then can you deliver your goods at the customer.
So instead of unloading / storing / loading / delivering at the customer, you've added another loading/unloading step, and another warehouse to rent in a more expensive area. Loading and unloading and warehouses are already is essentially the most expensive part of shipping anything - the transport on a train or truck itself is not that expensive.
There are specialized cases where cargo trams can work, but they are rare, and they do not involve delivering goods directly to stores, and do not involve expensive facilities in city centers.
In Dresden for example, VW used cargo trams the same way they would use mainline cargo trains - transporting car parts from one factory to another. That made sense, because both ends of the line already had cargo handling and warehouse facilities in inexpensive parts of the town, and only one loading/unloading cycle was needed. They needed no expensive inner city facilities and no further distribution.
But at that point, it doesn't really replace trucks, it just removes the need to connect your factory to the mainline rail network.