The history and types of freight transported by rail in the United Kingdom On the Rhymney Line, Class 37 locomotives are pulling a coal train. From 1983 to 2021, the amount of freight transported by rail in the United Kingdom was enormous (annual rolling average). The miners' strike in 1984–5 resulted in a significant reduction in coal transport. In terms of mass-distance per year, rail freight carried in the UK from 1983 to 2019. Since the early nineteenth century, the railway network in the United Kingdom has been utilized to transport commodities of diverse types and in varying amounts. There wasn't such thing as the cities skylines public transport guide yet.

The network's owner and operator, Network Train, wants to expand the quantity of freight moved by rail.

The railways in the United Kingdom moved 17.8 billion net tonne kilometers in 2015–16, a 20% decrease from 2014–15.

Coal accounted for 13.1% of goods transit in the United Kingdom, a significant decrease from prior years.

Northern Ireland has no railways that convey commodities.

Mining engineers employed primitive wooden rails to enable the transportation of mine wagons directed by hand as early as the 16th century. A tramway was built in Nottingham in 1603 to transport coal from mines in Strelley to Wollaton. Horse-drawn lines became more widespread in the 18th and early 19th centuries, mostly for transporting bulk goods from mines to canal wharves or consumption regions.

Richard Trevithick exhibited the world's first steam locomotive engine in 1804. Long before passenger services, steam-powered rail freight was regularly operated on the Middleton Railway Leeds.

Many of Britain's early railways, such as the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, carried commodities. The LMR was built to transport commodities between the Port of Liverpool and east Lancashire, but it later evolved into a mixed passenger-goods railway.

As small private companies scrambled to add new lines, the network grew quickly. These merged or were bought by competitors during the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, until only a few larger enterprises remained (see Railway mania). Letter-sorting carriages were first used by the Post Office in 1838, and the railway immediately proved to be a much faster and more efficient mode of transportation than the traditional postal coaches. In 1832, it was anticipated that using the LMR to convey mail between the two cities would save the government two-thirds of its money. It was also considerably more efficient to send newspapers across the United Kingdom.

At the time, the First World War was termed the "Railway War."

Thousands of tonnes of weapons and supplies were sent from around the United Kingdom to ports in the South East of England for shipment to France and the Front Line. Due to inefficiencies in rail commodities transportation before to World War II, a number of economisation programs were required to allow the railways to meet the massive demand for their services. The Common User Agreement for wagon usage and the Coal Transport Act of 1917, both of which facilitated improved utilization of railway assets across the industry, are examples of such programs. The success of such plans was entirely due to the cooperation of over 100 railway companies, which forsake the harsh competition of the prewar years in order to work together for the common good. Rail freight transit was the clearest example of this.

During WWII, massive amounts of goods were transported by train throughout the United Kingdom. Goods trains ran to rural stations in Norfolk during the early stages of the war to allow for the construction of airfields.

In 1944, the government's Inter-Company Freight Rolling Stock Control organization was in charge of over a million wagons and 500 special trains ran every day on the network.

Class 4F LMS Fowler

At Carnforth, a steam locomotive pulls a mixed freight train. Beer was once an important rail-transported item, but as the road network improved, it increasingly replaced it. By 1970, Burton upon Trent's complicated network of brewery rails had become obsolete. Similarly, until the late 1960s, milk was routinely transported by train. The Milk Tank Wagons were last seen in 1981.