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Remember how freight was set to triple in ten years? That was just hype to get your attention
This column wears its cynicism lightly. When introduced to the latest breakthrough in porcine aerodynamics I do not scoff. I certainly don't point out that it has been tried before and didn't work then: that guarantees being branded as a Negative Old Railway Fart (NORF).
No, I seek to understand the new technology, discuss the commercial applications and then write it up as objectively as this personal column ever gets. Long term readers may note that some of the more extreme claims are in inverted commas, code for editorial eyebrows being raised.
Thus it was, in 1996, when the recently privatised English Welsh & Scottish Railway announced that it was going to double tonne kilometres in five years and triple them in ten. This dramatic growth would be largely based on a revival of wagon load traffic. So, British Rail's Speedlink wagon load service reborn then?
Now, EWS Chairman and CEO Ed Burkhardt had it that British Rail had been to rail freight what King Herod was to the first born of Israel . But as someone who had reported on the birth, brief life and death of Speedlink it didn't seem like that at the time.
All the Speedlink managers I had met had been determined to give it a real go, had been equally ambitious in going for growth and pretty cheesed off when it didn't work. A fighting retreat had not been the objective.
So, with Ed proselytising like an old time revivalist, the ‘S' word was not mentioned. And, Ed was saying what everyone wanted to hear.
Soon the doubling/tripling was taken up by Government and was even endorsed in Labour's 1998 Transport White Paper. Before long, Railtrack was being anathematised for not starting to invest the hundreds of millions on extra capacity that would be needed to handle this tripling of freight traffic in ten short years.
Only Railtrack doubted. Behind the scenes, ‘Braybrook's bullsh*t forecast' was a popular alliteration on the then EWS Managing Director's surname.
And tonne kilometres did indeed increase quite dramatically. In the most recent financial year to 31 March 2000 , the DETR's bulletin of Rail Statistics gave rail net tonne km at 18.4billion.
This compares with 18.1billion in the peak year of the Thatcher-Lawson boom in 1988-89. A nasty dip followed in the early 1990s, so, while pre and post privatisation comparisons should be treated with caution, the raw data shows tonne km up 38% since EWS was formed.
Which is not bad. But doubling in five years from 1996 would have meant a 100% increase in 2001-02: good grief, how time flies, that's next year.
Second tonne-km is made up of tonnes carried and the distance hauled. As the graph shows, annual freight tonnages have hovered around the 100 million mark since privatisation.
Just to make the point, I have extrapolated where we should have been on tonne miles according to Ed Burkhardt's aspiration, assuming constant growth to double over the first five years.
Anyway, the Wisconsin Central July Coup saw Ed deposed. The Americans at EWS were helicoptered off the Customer Service Delivery Centre in Doncaster (that was last month's analogy - Ed) and a new Managing Director was appointed. As reported in this column, he has come up with a much more modest/realistic (delete as preferred) aspiration with doubling in 10 years at the top end.
And then, my old chum, and fellow one time Transport Journalist of the Year, Alan Whitehouse of the BBC, made a programme on rail freight in the ‘File on 4 series'. And among those interviewed was another old chum Graham Smith, Planning Director of EWS since privatisation.
What happened to doubling and tripling then', prodded Alan, ‘it hasn't happened, has it'?
And provoked in this way, Smith promptly exposed the railway press as uncritical pig fanciers.
According to Graham, the tripling target was made at the time of privatisation ‘to grab the headlines'. In contrast, the current target to double in 10 years ‘has some support, some thinking and some detail'. ‘That's the crucial difference', he explained, ‘between high level hyperbole and basic views of just what can be achieved, where the markets are and where the customer growth is going to be'.
So, it seems, we were victims of hype, me and John Prescott. But Graham Smith does not regret that youthful indiscretion. ‘In 1996, it was absolutely essential to get the importance and benefit of rail freight into the headlines. That's what we did'. As for the new aspiration, he still believes that ‘doubling something that was written off five years ago in 10 years time is pretty good going'.
Hmm, quite. The big question is was Wisconsin Central a victim of its own hype back in 1996 when it committed EWS to acquiring hundreds of new locomotives and several thousand new wagons. The lease rental on the 250 Class 66s alone has added around £30million to the EWS' costs?
It seems that the answer to the above question could be ‘yes' because Alan Whitehouse also got Ed Burkhardt to break his silence. And he was highly critical of his old company.
‘You either have a vision of how you're going to accomplish an objective like I had or you don't. The management there (at EWS) doesn't have that vision and I don't even know how they can double their business in 10 (years).
As for the current target, ‘that assumes significant growth each year and I don't see where they are going to get that if they don't get more aggressive in the market place'.
Burkhardt is concerned that freight carryings are about to revert to their historic ‘gentle decline'. And, ‘if you put that decline on a graph and project it out into the future eventually the line reaches zero'.
In contrast, during his three years at EWS ‘we turned that line rather sharply upward, but now all that's gone into decline, government support has been lost and gains in accessing the market have come to a screeching halt'. Burkhardt believes ‘we're looking at a resumption of the secular long term decline of the industry' and the future of railfreight in Britain is ‘very dim'.
Which is not what Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott says. Welcoming the arrival of the 250 th EWS Class 66 he said that the Government's Ten Year plan for Transport ‘will include measures for delivering at least 75% more rail freight movements, saving one billion lorry kilometres.
So there you are then. Who do you choose to believe?
Well, consultants always know best and we are ankle deep in consultancy studies of the UK freight market and rail's potential role. The Regulator, Railtrack, and now the Shadow Strategic Railway Authority have commissioned separate studies.
Paralysis by analysis looms. But I suspect that EWS will have the last word.