Potentially, that back-of-an-envelope figure could be pushed higher: Dover claims freight traffic has since expanded considerably, allowing them to talk about a figure of £100bn a year.
Sleeping passengers were rattled awake in the early hours of Tuesday when their train bound for Bangalore in southern India slammed into the back of a stationary freight train, crumpling the front coaches and killing at least 25 people.
The crash occurred about 5 a.m. when the passenger train, which can hold more than 1,000 people, barreled into the back of the freight train at a station in the town of Moamba, about 40 miles north of this city, the capital.
"On one $2 million account that we lost, all we had to do was cut $120,000 in costs," said Bronneck, who at one point during the meeting taped red paper wings to his back to play the role of a "freight fairy" who had come to make workers' dreams come true.
In October 2011, Luis Luna, 19, considers crossing back into the U.S. via the undercarriage of a freight car.
But today, the page was turned back many decades: a freight train stopped the race.
"It will come back," Ms. Schultz said of her hair over the whistle of a freight train passing nearby.
Fortunes have been made on the back of freight transport since the Roman Empire and Silk Road, yet the most recent example of the trend is based in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Then there's the sad whistle of a freight train.
