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The train is promising to take the strain of some of the booming market in ecommerce deliveries after a rail freight operators revealed plans to use old Intercity 125 trains to whisk parcels from Yorkshire to north London.

GB Railfreight plans to start offering the service between Doncaster and a site in north London from early 2018, in the hope it will revolutionise how goods are distributed in London. Same-day deliveries are currently almost entirely handled by trucks and vans.

Can't read that without a subscription.  :( This seems to be actual freight – well, parcels – rather than what they were doing a year or two ago taking fresh fish and seafood from Penzance to London in the guard's van? So presumably they're planning to rip the seats out and fill the space with parcels. They won't need a whole train's worth, will they? How many unused 125s are there anyway?

I would have thought a few old emu's would have been more efficient. I can't imagine the time saved at 125 will be that critical, unless it's the pathing that is the issue.

The train is promising to take the strain of some of the booming market in ecommerce deliveries after a rail freight operators revealed plans to use old Intercity 125 trains to whisk parcels from Yorkshire to north London.

GB Railfreight plans to start offering the service between Doncaster and a site in north London from early 2018, in the hope it will revolutionise how goods are distributed in London. Same-day deliveries are currently almost entirely handled by trucks and vans.

Duncan Clark, GB Railfreight’s director of strategic development, revealed the plans at the annual conference of the Rail Delivery Group, the train operators’ trade body. He presented the service as a way for businesses to offer same-day deliveries in London without incurring the expense of building a full distribution centre in an area where land and labour are both expensive and scarce.

The project would use some of the 125mph Intercity 125 trains built in the 1970s by British Rail after they are withdrawn from passenger service. It would be the first time a UK railfreight operator has offered a 125mph service and a return to the UK market of dedicated, high-speed parcel trains.

Mr Clark said the idea was to strip out the trains’ seats and load the packages into the spaces. The trains would carry north packages that had arrived at Heathrow airport and other points around London.

“You should be loading in both directions,” Mr Clark said.

Each train would be able to handle the same volume of packages as six trucks, Mr Clark said.

GB Railfreight had an agreement with Doddle, an internet delivery service, Mr Clark said.

Tim Robinson, Doddle’s chief executive, confirmed the company had been working with GB Railfreight on the potential opportunity to use the railways to provide retailers with “cost-effective, same-day delivery” of ecommerce orders into central London via its network of “click-and-collect” stores.

GB Railfreight also had a tentative deal with Asos, an online fashion retailer, to participate in the trial, Mr Clark said. Asos did not immediately respond to requests to comment.

Mr Clark said the Intercity 125 trains were ideal because they would be cheap to lease and extremely reliable.

Mr Clark did not say which terminal in London the service would use. Many sites once used for freight in London have been closed and turned over to other uses.

The operator planned to launch its service in early 2018 because of the challenges of obtaining the trains, Mr Clark said. Many Intercity 125s are still in service but are due to be replaced by new Intercity Express trains being built by Hitachi.

“We have to secure the rolling stock, otherwise we could go now,” Mr Clark said.

Julian Worth, chairman of the rail freight forum of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, said GB Railfreight’s idea was interesting.

“There’s certainly money to be made out of the premium market,” Mr Worth said. “It’s even more the case these days with the growth of internet deliveries and multichannel retailing.”

Mr Worth predicted that, provided GB Railfreight’s experiment was a success, it could pave the way for wider use of fast rail services to deliver goods into London.