Freight needs to do more on the domestic intermodal front, which is where both the problems and the opportunities lie
Nick Radcliffe, director of online brokerage and tracking service FreightArranger spoke to Rail Professional about increasing intermodal freight, HS2, engaging with retail customers, and the resurging desire for an effective freight system
R
adcliffe believes that rail freight is due a renaissance. Pointing to the decline between 1950 and the 1980’s brought about by the emergence of the tarmac alternative, in his opinion the pendulum swung too far and is only now correcting itself.
If Radcliffe’s theory is correct, his new service, several years in development, couldn’t arrive in the market at a better time. By allowing logistics firms and customers to better plan, utilise and track their goods over the rail network, Radcliffe hopes his FreightArranger can become a key tool in the due resurgence. Radcliffe arrived as a founder of FreightArranger through a background in making things work, and is a relative newcomer to rail freight. He graduated from Liverpool University with a degree in law before joining the Royal Navy, which included afloat and ashore stints in logistics, human resources, engineering support, and policy.
He then trained as a management accountant and was appointed to the Defence Transport and Movements Agency, where he was responsible for improving costs management. It was there that he first discovered the potential cost advantages of rail freight compared to road, and calculated the necessary components to achieving such savings. At that point Radcliffe began scribbling the first designs of what would become FreightArranger. He could see that road freight was struggling under the rising burdens of fuel and labour costs and that there was scope for rail freight to recover lost market share. In 2010, Radcliffe won the Technology Strategy Board’s Informed Logistics competition, which was the catalyst for the launch of the business.
Radcliffe recalls: ‘FreightArranger came about as a sort of accident. In fact, the name was only invented about 18
Page 54 December 2013
months after we started work. I was helping colleagues with an innovative freight train concept, and we knew that it needed an integrated IT system to manage all aspects of train operation if it was to successfully break the mould of current freight train operations. ‘While applying for the Technology Strategy Board’s Informed Logistics prize, we discovered that we were more likely to succeed if our project helped all freight operating companies rather than just one, so that became a fundamental building block of FreightArranger, and is what we have delivered.’
Increasing intermodal freight Following more than two years in development and testing, FreightArranger’s objective is simply to increase the use of intermodal rail freight, first in the UK and then in continental Europe. It is built on the belief that rail freight is attractive on the grounds of cost, environmental concerns and timing, but that users view it as more complicated to engage with than road haulage.
Specifically, where larger companies are able to use rail freight successfully, SME’s find it harder by virtue of having smaller freight volumes, and the lack of resources needed to invest in learning about how the system works. FreightArranger is specifically designed to simplify rail freight access by automating the search-quote-book process, simultaneously arranging short haul road haulage with the train, and tracking the container in transit. It is a web-based brokerage and tracking service, which makes it easy for consignors to use rail operations in the UK for freight flows as small as a single container.
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