Unit 3 rail transport

R eading

Task 1: Read the text and define the main points.

Text 1

Rail transport is most commonly used for heavy and bulky loads over long land journeys. Trains can maintain a consistent, reasonably high speed, and can link with other modes to carry containers and bulk freight. Rail services are organised in different ways. They are almost invariably public carriers (giving. a service to all other organisations) rather than private carriers (carrying goods for one organisation). This public service is often considered so important that it is run by the state.

One advantage of rail is that once the infrastructure is in place, it has very high capacity and low unit costs.

Another advantage of rail is that the unit transport cost is low, so it can be used to move large volumes of relatively low-priced materials, such as coal and minerals. For this reason, rail transport is more common in the earlier, upstream, parts of the supply chain. You are more likely to see organisations using rail for inbound raw materials than outbound finished goods.

The main disadvantage of rail is its inflexibility. All train services have to be timetabled in advance, so that they can all fit onto the same tracks. This leaves little flexibility for last minute or emergency deliveries. Despite this, train operators can provide a number of different services, perhaps offering merry-go-round services (where a train continually moves between two locations, such as a port and a factory), full train services (where customers hire an entire train), full wagon load attached to scheduled services, container transport, or shared wagons on scheduled services.

A more obvious concern is that trains can only travel along specified routes between fixed terminals, and cannot stop at intermediary points. Most customers are some distance away from these terminals, so they have to transfer goods by road at both ends of the journey. These transfers add time, and they can leave rail as a fairly slow alternative. It is more useful for long distances, but is inefficient for small journeys.

The problem of limited access is common to several modes of transport, but there are ways of overcoming its effects. The most obvious is to locate facilities near to rail terminals (or ports, airports, container ports or appropriate terminals). If demand is big enough, it is worth building special facilities. A power station, for example, might find that it is cheaper to build a special rail line to a coal mine, than to use tracks.

Useful vocabulary

bulky loads	сыпучие (наливные) грузы
private carriers	парк транспортных средств, принадлежащих частным организациям
unit coast	себестоимость
unit transport cost	стоимость транспортной единицы
inbound raw materials	закупочное сырье
outbound finished goods	готовая продукция, доставляемая покупателю
tracks	железнодорожные пути
emergency delivery	срочная доставка
merry-go-round	карусель
specified routes	определенные маршруты
intermediary points	промежуточные остановки
limited access	ограниченный доступ
facilities	сооружения, производственные мощности

Task 2: Read the text, translate it and find 3 or 4 sentences that express the main idea.