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The interior of a Class 321 as you have never seen it before. With its passenger seating removed and fittings for securing roll cages installed, this is the spacious interior of one of the vehicles in Varamis Rail’s 321428, on display at Liverpool Street station on March 13. The company aims to take its trains into city centre stations, helping to remove more logistics traffic from the roads and move it onto the railway.

Andy Coward

In mid-March, I found myself at Liverpool Street station in London for a preview event organised by Varamis Rail to showcase its converted Class 321 electric multiple unit trains, which have had all of their seating and passenger facilities removed and converted to accommodate cages for the carriage of parcels. It's a great way of utilising an otherwise redundant passenger train that would have likely been scrapped, despite being fully serviceable.

The movement of parcels and logistics by rail is nothing new, but Varamis is clearly a company that knows where it is going and it is tapping into a sector that is growing rapidly, with online ordering now fuelling a growth in parcel freight at unprecedented rates. And that growth shows no sign of abating in the future.

Each month in Railways Illustrated, we report in our fleet review pages about old EMUs being withdrawn from service and hastily dispatched for scrapping, but Varamis has embraced the concept of converting former passenger EMUs into parcel carriers, based on the Eversholt Raildeveloped Swift Express Freight unit 321334, which has been used by Varamis since it started operating a nightly service between Sheildmuir and Birmingham International last year.

The company now has 10 Class 321s in its rapidly-growing fleet, which it has bought from Eversholt, and five have already been converted for logistics use, while the remaining trains are currently unmodified, and these will be converted as business growth dictates.

Operating a high-speed logistics service by rail directly into cities such as Birmingham and London is a great way of removing countless lorry loads from our already congested motorway network and it is a sustainable, environmentally-friendly method.

Varamis has ambitious plans for growth and aims to increase its network of routes over the coming months. While parcels trains may not be an original concept for the railways, the internet parcels boom may help to see a renaissance for this type of service in the UK. We will be sure to follow its progress with much i