The Freight on Rail research provides interesting reading, and a nice counterpoint to the doom-laden soundbiters citing significant falls in rail freight traffic. Clearly, if you’re in the market for buying, selling, moving or burning coal for a living, then the Government’s selfish desire to reduce emissions and save the planet is a blow - notwithstanding the years of advance notice by Government that this was on the cards. Yet beyond the coal hole, prospects for construction and intermodal look much more encouraging.
Few would argue with FoR’s view that integrated rail and road planning into a cross-modal approach is the best way to reduce road congestion, collisions and pollution. Even the DfT, which since the departure of Tim Welburn and Chris Wilson has appeared to struggle with rail freight (see last year’s oxymoronic Rail Freight Strategy), is uncharacteristically positive towards the findings.
So why are we not yet basking in this cross-modal nirvana?
There are a multitude of reasons for this, and sadly many are the same hardy perennials that office-chair observers such as myself have been banging on about for years.
Beyond the disappearance of coal, the other elephants sulking in the other corners of the room are the cost of running / accessing the rail network, the time taken to plug in new railheads, the availability of decent paths, and the prices charged for the rail services themselves. No surprise that the end customers aren’t always overly impressed.
In terms of infrastructure, one of the biggest obstacles is the cost of new connections, meaning that only the largest Strategic Rail Freight Interchanges stand any realistic chance of affording it - assuming, of course, the planning system doesn’t continue to grind down the aspirations of developers to provide the very facilities that Government says it wants to see.
MTRU is right that upgrading existing rail lines parallel to congested motorway routes could allow large numbers of lorry loads to be transferred to rail, thus reducing road congestion and improving productivity - but not if there’s nowhere to load or unload the trains at each end, or if the costs of the upgrades then outweigh the benefits.
Turning to the train operators, fuel and/or infrastructure access charges account for over a third of the cost base. And with track access already down to a marginal cost basis, there’s little that Government policy could do with this to make it any cheaper without having to further compensate Network Rail in consequence.
For intermodal, an equally large chunk of the cost relates to lifting containers on and off the trains at each end, as well as the trucks needed at one or both ends to collect and deliver the containers. Despite the greater apparent efficiency of moving a trainload of containers between railheads, the total door-to-door price may then end up being not much different from straight road haulage. And road haulage isn’t resting on its laurels, with longer lorries, double-deck trailers, dual-fuel tractor units, self-driving or platooning vehicles all either in use or being tested, so don’t expect the level playing field to arrive or to then remain level for long.
Indeed, at an industry meeting a couple of years ago, one of the supermarkets implored the rail freight operators to achieve a major drop in prices in order to make intermodal irresistible - not 5% or 10%, but more like 20-30%. Easy to say, and who could argue with the sentiment, but I do have sympathy for operators trying to reconcile this request against large immovable chunks of cost on fuel and access, along with lifts and shifts at each end.
So what’s to be done to deliver the promise hinted at in the FoR research?
Fuel is an area that Government might want to dwell on, particularly given the incentives handed out to encourage gas-fired power stations, solar panels, scrapping old cars (and building factories for new ones), buying of first homes, winter warming of old age pensioners, and indeed moving freight by rail.
Given the relatively modest amount of fuel used by rail freight compared with other parts of the economy, and given the findings of the FoR research, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for Government to reduce (or remove) duty on fuel for locomotives and rail terminals (let’s call it Green Diesel and ignore the oxymoron), to reflect the wider environmental benefits of rail use. I’d argue that this would be a lot easier to administer for all concerned than the byzantine and increasingly rare Mode Shift Revenue Support scheme.
In addition, for as long as we remain in the EU there is also the Directive on Combined Transport (Eurocrat for intermodal), to reduce or remove the costs of moving containers by road to and from railheads, and for moving lorries by rail.
Since 1992 this has been taken up by most other Member States. In the review of the Directive which we carried out last year for the Commission, it was somewhat depressing to learn how far countries such as Austria and Germany had embraced the Directive compared with others - including the UK (spoiler alert), which confirmed that while implementation of the Directive was obligatory and that all the articles had been implemented, Article 6.1 (support for road vehicles carried by rail) could only be implemented once it was possible to carry taxed goods vehicles (tractor units) by rail in the UK. Oh, and Article 6.2 as well (exempting trucks moving containers to and from railheads from road vehicle taxes), as that couldn’t be implemented in a cost-effective way.
In an ideal world there would be: lower fuel charges for traction and/or a scrappage scheme to trade in everything pre-Class 60 and replace it with anything Class 88 or similar; little or no road taxes for trucks carrying containers to and from railheads; decent paths for freight with less recessing on route; W12 gauge to all corners of the UK; more cost-effective ways to plug new railheads into the network; and a planning system co-ordinated from national to local level to help these new railheads secure consent. The step-change in traffic which such a cunning plan could achieve would then provide the vital evidence base needed to underpin the business case for delivering new capacity when and where it’s needed, as part of a joined-up, cross-modal approach. Oink oink, flap flap, I hear you say. Quite.
But pending the arrival of strong and stable (along with sane and sustainable) Government policies towards the railways, the industry will (as ever) have to make the best of it. The emphasis will be on a small number of can-do individuals able to make bulk and intermodal trains as long or heavy as possible, make Royal Mail-type rail services as fast and mainstream as possible, make working practices as efficient as they are safe, and deliver new connections and gauge upgrades in a timely and cost-effective manner, alongside a steely determination to spend up to a quarter of a century securing consent for new interchanges and/or rail routes.
In other words, achieve little miracles every day that may often seem impossible to lesser mortals. The rest of us are very grateful that you do. In the meantime, those wishing to see FoR’s research findings made real should manage expectations accordingly, or work on developing porcine aviation instead.
