Xxxxxxxxxxx Freight
maintenance depots. At privatisation, he worked for Anglia Railways, part of GB Railways, where he rose to managing director. He was then offered the chance to head up a new freight division, GBRf, which became part of FirstGroup 11 years ago when First bought GB Railways. He has always maintained that the
success of the company is down to the high quality of its employees and he tries to meet regularly with all his staff, most of whom know him on a first-name basis. Has the company culture changed since
the business changed hands? ‘No. I wouldn’t let that change! I think,
like all owners, Eurotunnel are happy as long as we stick to the business plan and the growth continues – and they leave me alone to set how this business should be running.’ On the domestic front, the coal market
has picked up. GBRf has a contract to carry imported coal from the Port of Tyne to the Yorkshire power station, Drax. In the long term, of course, coal will be phased out as more environmentally friendly fuels take over. GBRf also has a toehold there, as it transports biomass for Drax. Biomass is a cleaner fuel source that can be made from
Above right: John Smith with a Class 66 locomotive in the old livery. Below: A Class 66 in the new livery at GBRf’s Peterborough depot
organic compounds, usually taking the form of wooden pellets. It is also imported through the Port of Tyne. ‘Drax is the biggest coal-fired power
station in Europe,’ says Smith. ‘It burns up to nine million tonnes of coal a year, which is a train every 45 minutes, seven days a week. They’re keen to go to biomass – we’re moving one million tonnes-plus a year for them now.’ A new departure for GBRf is two
contracts it has picked up to transport steel over short distances within a plant site. Celsa Steel, in Cardiff, produces re-usable steel from scrap metal – GBRf has 12 of its staff and two locomotives ferrying steel around the site. Last autumn it won a bigger contract to move steel around a site on Teeside, when a steelworks that had previously closed down was bought and re-opened by a Thai company called SSI. ’We’ve taken 40 people on and we’ve
rented 10 locos to move molten iron from the blast furnace to the steel works and carry the finished product from the works to the docks. SSI is a family run business – they’ve got rolling steel mills in Thailand and I don’t think they had iron ore in the old days, so they’ve always imported finished steel. The
‘There’s talk of how much the cost of transiting the tunnel is, but all I can say is that we’re managing to make money’
MARCH 2012 PAGE 29
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