Return to Archive -by date - by topic - 2002.
Readers may not be surprised that our vision for the 21st century freight railway comes from that timeless manual of practical railway management I tried to run a railway by Gerard Fiennes.
Here is the young Fiennes in 1936.
“The Cambridge line was full of trains. In the evening there was no path for coal trains out of Whitemoor for Temple mills between 6.55pm and midnight . I used to sit now and again in Audley End or Elsenham boxes and watch the stream of express goods pounding up the bank. One after another they came, J39s, J20s, J17s, with lines of dark vans and sheeted highs shouldering and chattering behind them. Before the tail light of one reeled out of sight to the south, the strong beat of the next rose out of the woods to my right. We brooded over those fast goods like hawks. One month, it was certainly May and, I think, 1936, our express freight punctuality was better than the express passenger”.
Back to 2002. Whether we can, or even could, recreate that degree of busyness on our modern railway, with its access rights and passenger service requirements and green zone maintenance is irrelevant. What is undeniable is that the market for such classic express freight is infinitely greater than in 1936.
Of course, the serpent in this potential garden of Eden is the lorry and the motorway.
Conventional political wisdom has it that the roads are choked with traffic and road freight is grinding to a halt. But if you drive late at night, even on the M25, you can watch 21 st Century logistics in action as the big artic's from the Excels and the Bookers and the Supermarket groups roll along in 60mile/h convoys. While journey times may be extending through congestion, with satellite tracking and computer routing, the lorry operators can deliver the green beans at the end of their journey from Kenya with an accuracy of plus or minus 15 min 'on the dock' of your local supermarket.
And there's the rub. The lorries roll door to door. Perhaps the nearest we come today to Fiennes express goods are Freightliner's maritime container trains storming over Shap and Beattock, the Ford engine trains heading for the factories in mainland Europe, the car transporters and, of course, coal trains. But let us not forget that Freightliner, MGR coal and even car transport are legacies of the Beeching era.
As Fiennes saw half a century ago, these traffics are suited to rail because the customer expects to have to interchange between modes. Inland freight terminals are an accepted part of the worldwide container business and container ships deliver their cargoes in big batches that rail is ideally suited to handle. In cars the trend is to fewer, bigger distributors. If your company's logistics include breaking bulk, or hub and spoke distribution, rail should stand a chance – if it is not being used already.
And here's another Fiennes truism. In today's JIT, 24/7 world, as in the 1960s, if you can't run non stop between natural distribution points, forget it: there simply isn't time for marshalling. As Fiennes declaimed the unit of traffic is the train. It is fashionable to deride Speedlink, but the managers responsible really tried to make it happen. It is a fact of life that with single loads over UK distances the lorry will usually win. Just how many lorry loads are needed for a flow to be more economic by rail is the big imponderable.
Over the past decade freight tonnage has fallen while tonne kilometres have increased. This is not the time to debate whether hauling coal from Scotland to Yorkshire simply to have given Enron extra efficiency in the sea borne leg is really in the national interest. Nor need we debate whether the Government's arbitrary target to increase rail freight's tonne kilometres by 80% is rational or possible. The key question is where will new tonne kilometres come from?
Despite increases in lorry weights, rail remains supreme when it comes to commodities in bulk. There is still nothing to beat rail when it comes to a thousand tonnes or more rolling terminal to terminal behind a single locomotive. And on long term flows, such as coal to the power stations there is scope for increases in efficiency.
But bulk commodities are not a growth market. Those 80% more tonne km are going to have to be won from the lorry and they will be hard won – and expensive. Already the Government is subsidising railfreight, overtly and covertly – for example, the halving of track access charges covered by yet another grant to Railtrack. And please don't write to complain that lorry owners don't pay their true infrastructure costs; rail will win high value time critical freight for its 21 st Century express goods by delivering a quality service not through intellectual argument with the Treasury. Note the Government caveat on the 80% target ‘provided the operators improve efficiency and service quality'
That may annoy the Rail Freight Group, which asks ‘what about Railtrack's efficiency and service quality'. Tough: subsidies to operators, grants to customers for terminals and wagons and the SRA's new operator neutral subsidy designed to encourage on the rail competition (and that sounds familiar) will only count if the quality of service is better than that provided by road haulage. And ‘better' covers a multitude of virtues. Rail has to be faster and more reliable just to be equal. And that will not be easy
None of these virtues is addressed by the SRA's self indulgent freight competition which seems to be going nowhere slowly. Now that Ed Burkhardt's vision of running a North American short-line style wagon-load service in this tight little island has followed Speedlink into oblivion, it is time for a new vision, a big vision to get those express goods pounding along again, block and block.
We know the market is there, we know that there are distances over which rail can compete, new technology means that you can track and monitor trains and consignments with unprecedented accuracy – and run trains faster. It is time, we suggest, for the freight companies to say where that 80% growth in tonne kilometres is coming from and how it is going to win it on merit. And then exploit the government;s munificence to the hilt.