DASHING THROUGH THE NIGHT
It has been 20 years since the Royal Mail’s night train reached the end of the line. Many will associate the train, which carried post overnight from London Euston to Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, with the 1936 General Post Office Film, Night Mail. The documentary detailed the inner workings of the postal rail service, featuring a score by Benjamin Britten and commentary from W.H. Auden.
The lines, “This is the night mail crossing the Border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order, Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner, the girl next door” will be familiar to many.
Having made its first journey in 1838, the night mail train ceased operation in 2004, with air and road being deemed cheaper options for transporting post. There is something poetic about the image of the mail train chugging quietly through the country by night, brimming with letters destined for various homes.
Now Phil Read, a former train driver and now CEO of Varamis Rail, is hoping to bring it back as he explained to Justin Webb on the Today programme. Varamis has been buying out-of-service trains for its freight service. Paul said it’s all about “making better use of these trains as they came out of passenger use and bringing infrastructure around the UK that was used many years ago for this type of service back into purposeful use.”
While the new service will be mainly concentrating on parcels, they can pretty much move anything that a large company would want to move.
“That time when goods and parcels are moving though the night can be seen as downtime,” Phil says. “We can try to offer a better way of using that time by making sure that parcels and goods can be sorted ready for ‘last mile’ deliveries the next morning.” Bravo!