No, not a pot of tea for two. David J. Hayes and Paul Dorney look back at a West Midlands trip freight diagram from yesteryear when such duties were very much taken for granted and an everyday part of railway operations
As we all well know, there was a time when trip workings were an important and everyday part of railway operations in most parts of the country, especially for wagonload freight. Such diagrams could be quite complex and keep a single locomotive busy for twelve hours or more tripping traffic to and from a multitude of locations, some of which could be visited at least twice or more times during the course of the day.
In addition to servicing the heavily industrialised regions, they could even be found visiting some of the more remote parts of the network where they were perhaps regarded as a lifeline for many communities reliant on rail for the collection or delivery of such commodities as animal feed, fresh produce, machinery and a myriad of other miscellaneous goods. Nothing was ever too big or too small for the railway to handle, whether it was an out of gauge load of oversized steel bridge beams for a major road or motorway construction project or a single 16 tonner containing coal for a village coal merchant.
Things are very much different nowadays,though. The decimation of the UK wagonload network coupled with the relentless reduction of railheads dealing with less than trainload volumes of rail freight has now rendered the local trip freight an extinct species, as is now the national wagonload operation itself (with the exception of movements to and from wagon repair facilities), which was finally abandoned by DB Cargo (UK) in aut
