Comment


cheering at Southampton or the less cheery news in the Office of Rail Regulation’s freight statistics. The ORR figures show fewer of all rail freight commodities except metals went by train in September to December 2010 than in the same period of depressed 2009. The sector’s fate matters to the whole railway industry. Because


freight attracts so little political and media attention, its interests are readily ignored or forgotten. It is also unusual in operating largely unsubsidised. If rail freight is struggling, it is fair to assume, there are questions about the health of the wider railway industry. The most obvious concern is that there might not be enough stuff to move. Rail freight has traditionally catered mainly to the needs of coal- fired power stations, steel mills, road builders and other heavy-haul customers. Many British steel mills have closed and building activity looks set to be slack for some time to come. Coal is most worrying of all. Britain’s growing reliance on coal


imported through ports such as Hunterston in Ayrshire and on Scottish open-cast coal had created vast new demand for long hauls of coal to English power stations. But demand fell by 2.33 billion net tonne-kilometres between its 8.56 billion tonne-km peak in 2006-7 and the 6.23 billion carried in 2009-10. The next most significant heavy-haul commodity – construction material – accounted for only 2.78 billion tonne-kms. The industry’s culture also needs to change. Jim Clark, logistics


manager of the Malcolm Group, which now charters 56 trains weekly to undertake the long hauls of its goods movements across the UK, says rail has traditionally had a ‘can’t-do’ attitude and needs to learn the more ‘can-do’ attitude of the trucking sector. Another senior rail freight executive relates how traditionally, in a rail freight yard, staff were employed to check every train for faults. It is hardly surprising, he points out, that they tended to justify their jobs by finding faults – including many that drivers knew represented no real safety or operational risk. The most recently founded rail freight operators – GB Railfreight, Direct Rail Services and others – have been most successful at introducing a new spirit into their operations, most onlookers believe. DB Schenker and Freightliner, the two surviving inheritors of bits of British Rail, have suffered the same reluctance to tackle entrenched, inefficient working practices as some of their passenger operator colleagues. The rail network’s general state also severely affects rail freight. A


return to 2003 levels of punctuality would send many goods scurrying back to the roads. A move towards vertical integration of passenger operators and infrastructure managers could have an equally chilling effect, many rail freight operators fear. A vertically-integrated passenger operator might be even more inclined than current


‘Because freight attracts so little political and media attention, its interests are readily ignored’


signallers to forget about an inconvenient freight train waiting for a path in a busy evening peak. Yet, at present, any observant passenger on the West Coast Main


Line is likely to encounter abundant evidence that one branch of the industry at least is flourishing. The industry is succeeding in using high fuel prices, road congestion and environmental concerns to attract the long-haul legs of container movements to rail. Operators are starting to offer not only to run the now-traditional services between ports and inland depots – such as Daventry – but between different inland points. Container traffic fell 1.7 per cent between the last quarter of 2010 and the same period in 2009. But the segment saw a 6.5 per cent rise in traffic between 2008-9 and 2009-10, to 5.51 billion tonne-kms. The secret of containerised freight’s success on rail, according to


many involved, is that the freight operators have learned to integrate their operations into wider transport systems. It is striking how many of the industry’s recent success stories – such as a train that now brings Spanish tomatoes to the UK through the Channel Tunnel – feature rail freight operations that form part of a single, smoothly-run logistics system, rather than rail-only movements. Rail operators’ fates increasingly lie in the hands of freight forwarders who can consolidate customers’ shipments into single, long train loads of different containers. The industry will have to think more about the needs of these forwarders and hanker less for customers whose vast factories could produce regular, reliable train loads of freight. There are concerns that new depots for switching containers


between road and rail are struggling to win planning permission. Given the modest cost of some gauge-enhancement work – Southampton to Nuneaton cost only £70m – the government seems disappointingly reluctant to fund the work. But the cheering at Southampton does not seem entirely misplaced. Margins – and the competitive advantage over lorries – should increase if rail costs come down. The number of freight trains thundering through Southampton and other rail freight centres should keep growing.


n See page 11 for news story on lowliner freight wagons for high cubes


ROBERT WRIGHT is transport correspondent for the Financial Times: robert.wright@ft.com


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