KEY POINTS:
- Share information on freight workings
- Develop the Strategic Freight Network
- Secondary routes
- Relieve burden on HS1
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To Sir Peter Hendy, chairman of Network Rail:
You have been gifted with an unenviable task, one that follows in the shackled footsteps of Beeching, Serpell and McNulty. So I appreciate the burden of expectation that currently rests on your shoulders - Transport for London must seem a very distant (and relatively pleasant) memory…
Twenty years on from privatisation, the rail freight sector has made significant achievements, growing traffic by almost 70% despite multiple setbacks from within and outside the rail industry.
The Rail Delivery Group estimates that per annum, rail freight generates £1.5 billion in economic benefits, and pays £150 million into Treasury coffers. Trains now carry around a quarter of containers from the ports, support Jaguar Land Rover, Mini and other automotive manufacturers with their exports, and keep the supermarket shelves stacked with products for most of the major retailers.
Rail has also helped keep the lights on, by delivering coal to the power stations, although after decades of service the coal-fired stations are closing and coal volumes by rail are falling.
If rail is to unlock at least some of the massive untapped potential (see the 2013 NR Freight Market Study for some spectacularly bullish forecasts), the train operators will need to be far more innovative and aggressive in their approach. However, no amount of innovation or sales effort will deliver traffic if the rail network can’t carry it in a cost-effective and competitive manner. Hence this letter to you.
Let’s start with a relatively easy one: better information about the freight capabilities of the rail network and what operates over it.
It wasn’t that long ago we were told that opening up the workings of the Working Timetable to the outside world (such that the outside world could then make more use of rail) wasn’t possible for reasons of commercial confidentiality - the outside world might find out how it works!
Thankfully common sense has prevailed, and several startups have produced apps that now tell the rest of us in real time where freight trains are running, although you still have to know where to look.
A Network Rail portal that allows new customers to see who runs what between where (think of a freight version of National Rail Enquiries), along with better interactive mapping of network capabilities (loading gauge, axle loads, trailing weights) would help drive new business onto the railways - and drive out a lot of us rail consultants, which in itself must make it a price worth paying.
Then there’s the tricky subject of physically gaining access to the network. If you want to connect a new freight terminal to the main line, there’s not going to be much change left from £5m. Yes, five million quid! As we’re often told: “It’s not the labour guv, it’s the signalling.”
This can be a big deterrent to plugging new sources of freight traffic into the network. Hence it would be useful to look at the make-up of these costs and (as with the rest of the network’s cost base) how this could be reduced.
If not, could there be other development models worth exploring, such as NR taking the capital investment hit in return for a long-term agreement with the end user through a lease or Connection Agreement? After all, NR is otherwise asking third parties to invest considerable sums upfront in someone else’s infrastructure, with no long-term guarantee as to how that investment might be realised or protected.
Talking of access, and mindful of the ever-expanding ‘click and collect’ market, NR is in the enviable position of having 2,533 key locations in and around towns and cities where freight could be dropped off and collected - otherwise known as passenger stations.
While Doddle is taking care of things on the stations themselves, a small startup called 5PL Ltd (I declare an interest here) is now moving parcels again on passenger trains (think Red Star for the 21st century), starting with those nice people at East Midlands Trains.
Key to allowing 5PL and other providers to expand such services will be securing the remaining stations where small delivery vans can get close to (or in some cases alongside) the trains, to effect a smooth transfer of high-value, time-sensitive freight.
Trials into Euston over the past couple of years show what can be achieved when common sense prevails over the ‘elf & safety brigade, as you yourself demonstrated with the Tube in recent years - I’d love to have seen the look on some people’s faces when someone suggested allowing antique mobile coal-fired high-pressure boilers (steam locomotives) to run into London and penetrate the depths of the capital’s underground rail network. Our experience in trying to get freight back into central London has involved similar levels of disbelief and abject horror from some quarters.
