The gate at Kinnery carries two signs. The new one says INTERCHANGE. The old one, bolted to a post that no company will admit to owning, still says SALT REACH GOODS YARD, and nobody has taken it down because nobody is quite sure whose ladder it would be. The men on nights call the whole thing the yard.

I came here because of a number. Something close to nine tenths of everything sold in this county has been lifted off a train at some point in the fortnight before it reaches a shelf, and almost all of that lifting happens between midnight and six. The day is for selling things. The night is for moving them. You are meant not to notice, and the arrangement works so well that most people never do.

The shift begins with a list

Dolan, who runs the night, prints the list at ten past ten and reads it standing up, because he says that sitting down to a list is how you end up believing it. Eleven services in, nine out. Two of the inbound are marked LATE with a figure beside them: forty minutes, two hours ten.

The two hours ten is a container train from the coast that has been held outside Brantwick for a signalling fault since the middle of the afternoon. It is not late because of anything that happened at Kinnery. It is late because of something that happened two hundred kilometres away, six hours ago, to a piece of equipment that Dolan has never seen and never will.

Nothing here is late by accident. Lateness is manufactured somewhere else, hours earlier, and then arrives exactly on time.

He puts the list on the wall and goes out to the crane.

What a container knows

A container knows four things: what it weighs, where it is going, what it may be stacked under, and when it stops being somebody's problem. It does not know what is inside it, and neither, for most of the night, does anyone at Kinnery. This is not carelessness. It is the whole design. The box is the unit of trust. Once the seal is on and the number is in the system, the contents become a matter for the customs office and the insurer, and the yard is free to treat forty tonnes of frozen fish exactly as it treats forty tonnes of garden furniture.

The one exception stands on its own track under a light, plugged into a socket, humming: a reefer, a refrigerated box, which is the only kind of freight here that can die. Everything else can wait a week. A reefer has a temperature, a power draw and a log, and if any of the three goes wrong somebody has to know within the hour.

Roshan checks them twice a shift with a torch and a clipboard, which he insists is faster than the tablet, and I believe him.

Four o'clock

The hour everyone warned me about arrives without ceremony. Between about half past three and half past four, the yard does roughly a third of its night's work:

• the held train finally comes in, two hours ten becoming two hours twenty-five by the time it is stopped and pinned;
• the first of the morning's road collections arrive early, because the drivers would rather queue here than sit on the motorway;
• the shift changes at the signal box up the line, so for about twelve minutes nobody answers the telephone;
• and the wind, which has been doing nothing all night, gets up enough to make the crane operator slow down.

Dolan does not shout. I had expected shouting. What he does instead is walk, continuously, in a loop of maybe three hundred metres, and speak to people one at a time in a voice that would not carry past the two of them. At one point he stands beside a driver's window for four minutes saying, as far as I can tell, nothing at all, while the man drinks a coffee. Then the driver puts the cup down and moves, and the queue behind him moves, and that is the intervention.

What breaks

I asked everybody the same question at some point in the night: what actually goes wrong here?

Nobody said the cranes. Two people said the software, meaning the system that assigns a box a place in the stack and then, occasionally, assigns it a place that is already occupied. Everyone said the paperwork, by which they meant the gap between what a haulier has told the system and what the haulier has actually sent.

And Roshan said the sockets. There are forty-two reefer points at Kinnery and on a bad week in February there are fifty-one reefers. The rest go on generator, which is noisier, dearer and requires a man with a torch. Nobody has built the extra nine sockets, he says, because the extra nine sockets would cost somebody a budget line this year to prevent a problem that only appears on other people's spreadsheets next year.

This is, I have come to think, the whole of infrastructure in one sentence. Everything expensive is a decision taken by somebody who will not be there for the consequence, and everything cheap is a decision taken by somebody who will.

Half past six

The last outbound leaves at 06:14 and the yard empties of noise so completely that I can hear the reefers again. Dolan takes the list off the wall, writes two figures on the bottom of it, and puts it in a drawer with four hundred others.

On the way out I pass the old sign. SALT REACH GOODS YARD. There has been no salt through here since before Dolan was born, and no reach either: the river was culverted in the sixties and runs under the long-stay car park. The name is the last piece of the thing the name was for, which is how most of this works, and how almost none of it is explained.