It might have been helpful for the Strategy to recognise that quite modest reductions in traffic can have a disproportionately large impact on congestion - research suggests that a 2% decrease in traffic can reduce congestion by 10%.
MacRae feels that a similar publication to that produced by the Scotland Freight Joint Board - an easy to understand guide to the benefits of using rail freight services and how to access them - would be equally useful in England and Wales as part of telling the story.
“More work needs to be done to explain to potential customers how they should think about rail freight, and what questions they should be asking to see whether or not it is going to be of use for their traffic,” he says.
Planning issues
One thorny subject barely touched upon in the Strategy is planning, although a lack of strategic rail freight interchanges (SRFIs) is seen as a constraint to intermodal growth. An SRFI should be over 60 hectares, capable of handling more than four freight trains a day, have rail-accessible buildings, ideally receive trains of 775 metres in length, be designed to minimise the need for shunting, be close to trunk roads and rail line(s), and be gauge-cleared to at least W8.
Both Simpson and Julian Worth, Senior Consultant with the Rail Logistics Company, believe we have come a long way since the time when the Nissan and Toyota factories could be built without a requirement for a rail connection, and Simpson believes the planning framework in place is now better understood. Whether it will shorten lead times remains to be seen.
Hardly any new terminal has been built without a long planning battle, even when the wider benefits to the economy and environment are substantial and obvious. Some large SRFIs have been a decade in the planning before a sod was turned, and even small depots have taken years - such as the Highland Spring depot at Blackford, which finally received the go-ahead in March 2016. The delay was caused by local objections, despite the benefit of fewer lorries travelling through the village.
Fears that rail connections were being used as leverage to gain planning permission for developments biased towards road transport are discounted by Worth.
“Daventry shows they are not a Trojan horse to get planning permission - far more trains are going in and out of Daventry than originally forecast,” he says.
“Terminals within the Golden Triangle are being driven by the inbound supply chain, and the cost saving of a box delivered by rail from port is at least 30%, perhaps 40%.”
Potential for intermodal
The Strategy recognises that the commodity category capable of the fastest expansion is intermodal, both deep sea and domestic. The suppressed demand for want of adequate capacity has been recognised for many years, but progress in improving the main north-south route to Britain’s principal container port at Felixstowe has been frustratingly slow.
Currently 30% of Felixstowe and Southampton containers travel by train, keeping about 2,500 lorry movements a day from the Essex port off the A14. But the proportion of those goods being forwarded from the receiving National Distribution Centre to a Regional Distribution Centre is tiny. The AECOM report suggests that rail-connected NDCs have the ability to “make rail much more competitive in the next leg of the supply chain from NDC to RDCs or customer/store.”
The report adds: “The ability to put a container/swap body on rail for circa £20-£30 at such a rail-connected NDC, rather than circa £80-£150 if a road leg is involved to a nearby terminal, could lead to significant numbers of Midlands to Scotland/South East/South West trains which, so far, only a few companies have exploited. Tesco, for example, is one of a small number of companies which has adopted rail as part of their supply chain for certain flows. Under this scenario rail’s competitive distances in the domestic haulage market come down from 300+ miles to under 150 miles for inter-terminal movements.”
