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Issue 3 2015 - Freight Business Journal


///FREIGHT BREAK Seeing through the see-through container


Freight Break has to confess to falling for an April Fool the other day. In late March, we got an emailed press release from Stanford Le Hope-based forwarder Westbound Shipping about a new revolutionary container. Apparently, it was made of “a high density, non-scratch, strong-as-steel clear Perspex” but that wasn’t what was truly remarkable about it: “What is ingenious about this ground-breaking design is that once the small electrical current is switched off the container becomes completely transparent, enabling those on the outside to see the entire contents.” The release was accompanied by strict


instructions to respect an embargo and not to send it out until 8am on 1 April, which should have been a


bit of a giveaway, I suppose. Yours truly of course fired off a load of


supplementary questions including: who makes it; why haven’t we heard of this revolutionary new technology before; and, showing what a sad case I really am, I see they’re in your own colour scheme – that’s very unusual for a forwarder, isn’t it? I do wonder, also, what would have happened


if some publication or website had chosen not to respect the embargo and sent it out before 1 April. I suppose, to save face, Westbound would have had to commission a boffin to invent an electrically- activated see-through strong perspex in double- quick time. Possibly not beyond the bounds of possibility these days.


Will airfreight go supersonic? A rail mystery


Mystery and intrigue are somewhat rare commodities in the world of railway enthusiasm I’d imagine but the well-respected publication, Railway Magazine (RM) has unearthed a strange puzzle. Back in 1962, the Birmingham Railway Carriage and


Wagon Company unveiled Lion, a then revolutionary diesel locomotive. In a striking white colour-scheme – rather ill-advised, I’d have thought, given the filth and grime that was the prevalent railway environment in those days – she trundled around the country in a bid to drum up a big order from British Railways. To no avail - beset by teething troubles, Lion turned


out to be more of a moggy. BR was not impressed and she last pulled a train in about February 1964, before being scrapped some time in 1965. Nothing was seen of Lion for a whole year before


she was finally spotted being cut up in a Sheffield scrapyard, prompting some people to theorise that, before meeting her ignominious fate, she was shipped off to the US to try and win some export sales - though quite why that country’s hard-nosed railroad bosses would want to buy a loco that had already been deemed too unreliable even for BR in the 1960s isn’t entirely clear. Apparently, the whole trip was made under conditions of utmost secrecy, presumably to reduce the amount of egg on the face of Britain’s rail engineering industry if there were no buyers. So if any of our more senior readers involved in


transatlantic shipping in 1964-65 remembers moving a white diesel loco, I’m sure RM would be very interested to hear.


Geography lesson


A press release reaches us from the offices of Meantime Communications. “Kerry Logistics UK is embracing the spirit of the game by sponsoring a soccer club close to its Leeds facilities, Cleethorpes Town Football Club.” (our italics). I’m not sure the good folk of Lincolnshire would


see themselves as close to the Tykes, physically or in any other sense of the word. No matter, Kerry Logistics’ logo will appear on the back of the first team shirt for the current season, as the Owls (no connection with Sheffield Wednesday) battle for first place in the (take a deep breath) Toolstation


Northern Counties East League Premier Division. The release goes on: “The sponsorship initially


came about because we were approached by one of our customers, David Mann, MD of Pattesons Glass, who is on the board of Cleethorpes Town... Pattesons is based close to Kerry Logistics, and is as passionate as we are about supporting his local community.” Now the geography is a bit more on the mark.


According to the company’s website, Pattesons is indeed based in Grimsby. But we thought we’d better check.


Is Russia working on a supersonic cargo plane, asks the gizmag.com website. A state-run Russian news site says that President Putin’s men want to build a huge, supersonic cargo plane capable of shiſting a 181-tonne payload at up to 1,243 mph over a range of 4,350 miles. In military terms – and this is what the PAK TA (Perspective Airborne Complex of Transport Aviation) craſt is really aimed at - that means 400 heavy tanks or 900 more


lightly armoured vehicles to a battlefield of your choice in little more than a few hours. The An124 and even the giant


An225 conventional aircraſt look lumbering and puny in comparison. In fact, another giant of Russian aviation, Ilyushin, is said to be heavily involved in the project. As the website rightly points


out, doubling the speed of transport craſt while at the same


time carrying unprecedented payloads seems pretty far-fetched, especially for a country currently as cash-strapped as Russia. But it is a long-term project;


no less a person than Ilyushin Aviation Complex CEO Viktor Livanov puts the launch date at around 2030. Presumably, the likely price-tag


would mean that it would take quite a while for the craſt to trickle down to the civil aviation market.


Fast footwork


On the subject of speed, which is the world’s fastest airline? They’ll find out in Budapest this September, but not in the sense of which carrier has managed to coax one of their ageing narrowbodies up towards Mach 1. The annual Race to Find The


Fastest Airline In The World will take place at 11.00 on Saturday 5 September 2015 on Budapest Airport’s 13R-31L – on foot. Runners from airlines, airports and enterprises across the aviation community once again compete for a series of anna.aero-Budapest Airport trophies, including the key ‘Fastest Airline in the World’ team prize.


All entry fees – €30 before July


2015, €50 thereaſter – are donated to cancer charities, and other child-focussed good causes and


every finisher receives ‘The Bron’s Medal’ named for Brontë “Bron” Hogan, the anna.aero publisher’s 12-year-old daughter, who passed away in 2011 aſter a five-year battle with leukaemia. There are two race distances – 10km (four runway lengths) and 5km (a distance favoured by sofa-loving revenue management executives, say the organisers). Aer Lingus is the airline to beat aſter it swept to victory this year, winning both the top team prize


as well fielding the fastest runner, fleet cost manager, Robert Murphy. There are all sorts of categories,


including Fastest Airport, Fastest Aviation Media Team (obviously standards are not high here) and Fastest Aviation Enterprises Team. And last time, the Fastest Airline CEO prize went, serendipitously enough, to József Váradi, boss of Wizz Air. To register your interest, or sign visit: http://www.anna.aero/


up, budrunwayrun


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