The rumble of large trains of shipping containers has become an ever-more common sound around stations such as Caledonian Road on the North London line. The freight uses the route - which links Stratford in east London with Richmond in south-west London - because it is the only route with enough space under bridges and in tunnels for modern, nine-foot six-inch high containers to travel on ordinary wagons between the busy North Sea ports of Felixstowe and Tilbury and the key London-Glasgow West Coast Main Line.
The demand for such a route is gradually increasing as volumes of goods arriving in the UK from Asia continue to grow.
However, the future of freight traffic on the route, which also carries heavy passenger traffic, is dependent on many factors - many of them decisions made by government departments or in shipping lines' headquarters. Traffic on the route could flatten off if lines decided they preferred alternatives to increasingly-crowded Felixstowe, the UK's busiest container port.
It could also increase if Felixstowe, the nearby Port of Harwich and London Gateway on the Thames are all finally allowed to build new container ports to meet the surge in demand. Traffic could fall, however, if expansion prompts work on alternative rail routes to allow them to handle the new, higher containers.
Takaya Soga, deputy managing director for Europe of the liner (container-shipping) business of Japan's NYK Line, says his company first removed some volumes from the UK ports in 2003 and 2004, when they first became seriously congested. The line initially shifted only its trans-shipment business - business unloaded from one ship to be loaded on another - to Benelux ports, such as Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Antwerp.
"The waiting time for feeder vessels was tremendously long," Soga says. "Some of the carriers again shifted back those volumes from the continental ports to UK ports. So what we are really doing now is a game of ping-pong. It all depends on the availability of the ports."
"We have to make a balance," Soga says.
The smaller volumes from smaller ports would probably go by road.
Such factors make Patrick Walters, in charge of the Europe and North Africa region of Dubai-based DP World, predict that ships will resume direct calls at ports near major centres once capacity is expanded to keep up with demand.
He even claims there has been some return to direct calls in the UK already after improvements to operations at the Port of South-ampton. Dubai-based DP World is developing the London Gateway terminal, due to open in 2010 and be the UK's largest single container terminal.
"We've seen - sometimes very - rapid shifting of shipping patterns back into the UK, which I think reflects the fact that trans-shipping containers is more expensive than direct calls," Walters says.
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