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Although rail and water freight have their limitations, increased capacity

12th April 2007, Page 56
12th April 2007
Page 56
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Page 56, 12th April 2007 — Although rail and water freight have their limitations, increased capacity
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

can be of benefit to road haulage. As more and more operators embrace intermodal transport, what opportunities will be theirs for the taking?

David Hal* investigates. Getting freight off the road and onto trains and ships is a Holy Grail for the Green Age: hugely desirable but enormously elusive.

And it's not only hard-line environmentalists who are flocking to the intermodal banner. Because the UK is so congested, the aspiration to take freight off roads is not only backed by the government and by rail and shipping interests, but also, less predictably, by road hauliers themselves.

In fact operators are so unthreatened by other methods of carrying freight that most would welcome cuts in congestion more than they would regret contracts going to other modes of transport. Even a cursory survey of the freight sector shows that road and rail are not competing against one another in any _ meaningful sense. If they were, you might expect hauliers and the trade associations that represent them to resent business taken by the railways but the reverse is true. Even the Freight Transport Association (FTA),which has the interests of road haulage at its heart, wants to see an increase in rail-freight capacity.

Several road hauliers, including Eddie Stobart and Scottish operator John G Russell, have used rail wherever it makes economic sense. For them it is just another mode of transport in the logistics toolkit.This reflects a willingness to give some backing to the environmental agenda, but also indicates how hauliers are transforming themselves into sophisticated transport operations. They are not so much wedded to the open road as to the best way of transporting goods, whatever that might be.

In Stobart's case, the most high-profile example to date of its willingness to use the rail network came last September. when it started a three-year contract for Tesco to move goods between Daventry in the Midlands and Livingston in Scotland.

Both directions

Trains in Stobart livery run in each direction every weekday, leaving Daventry at 6.31am and arriving in Grangemouth just after 4pm. The goods are then taken by road to Tesco's Livingston warehouse and a fully loaded train heads back from Daventry just after 6pm, arriving just before 3am.

Of course,Tesco has the scale to fill entire trains on its own.And it is also true that the contract was partly funded by grants from the Department for Transport (£235,000) and the Scottish Executive (£200,000 towards the capital cost of buying the intermodal containers). However, even where rail freight business is won on the open market, road hauliers do not appear to feel threatened by the process.

John G RussellTransport, based near Glasgow, has long taken the attitude that it can offer both road and rail options to its customers it makes decisions based on economic sense rather than confining itself to one method of transport or another.

And it is not just road hauliers that venture outside their traditional area of expertise; rail companies have a long history of operating road fleets alongside their trains, Freightliner is a prime example of this (see panel).

Christopher Snelling, the FTA's head of rail freight and global supply chain policy. says: -We expect road freight to grow so much that we are concerned that rail freight maintains its share of the market. We are certainly keen that it does so."

To do that, Snelling aelieves rail freight must expand beyond its traditional market of bulk goods such as oal and aggregates.

onsumer goods are an abvious possibility, although here are fears that deals ;uch as the Tesco contract ire only possible where here is sufficient scale to fill entire trains.

Large loads

inelling predicts that railreigh t operators will :ontinue to find a market or large loads and long ourneys, although he adds that to confine all's role to these parameters is simplistic; here might also be scope for trains to carry nore cargo in parts of the country where oads congestion is at its worst.

He says:"Road hauliers suffer from ongestion as much as anybody else. If the reight that can move by rail does move by rail, : frees up space on the roads for hauliers to operate more efficiently."

Unfortunately, getting more freight onto the railways poses multiple challenges. Not only is rail capacity limited (see panel), but even where capacity exists the rail system is far from the most flexible form of transport.

Snelling says:"You need to be sure in advance that you can use a regular slot.This just doesn't suit all freight customers."

And if getting freight from road to rail is a major challenge, it's nothing compared with the task of moving substantial amounts of freight onto the inland waterways.

Dr Anthony Whiteing. senior lecturer at the Institute forTransport Studies at the University of Leeds, explains that British canals are so narrow compared with their European counterparts that freight possibilities are limited:"Our canal system was never built for large-capacity vessels, unlike somewhere such as Holland,where the canal and river system offers real options for taking larger vessels. That isn't going to happen here."

Using coasters

More fruitful, says Whiteing, is the increasing use of coastal vessels to ship containers from the main deep-sea container ports to smaller ports around the coast.

This offers the possibility of building distribution centres near the ports, such as the Asda warehouse which opened on the quayside at Teesport in March 2006.This enables distribution centres to take containers directly from ships, rather than transferring them cross-country by road or rail.

Also becoming fashionable are 'inland ports': multimodal freight centres which are not on the coast but offer all the facilities offered by ports, including customs clearance.

Developer HelioSlough, knocked back this year in its effort to put up a multimodal centre near St Albans (see panel), is steaming ahead in other locations.

is year it put up the 58,000m2Sheffield Int rnational Rail Freight Terminal, at Junction 32 of the Ml, and the 70,000m2 Nimbus Park at Thorne, South Yorks, on Junction 6 of the M18which,it says, has "ideal links to the Humber ports".

Such developments should give the UK's int rmodal market more options, although everybody involved warns against overstating the case for rail and sea transport. It has its role, particularly with petroleum (which goes largely by sea) and coal (largely by rail), and it can help to take some heavy traffic off the roadsbut it will always be secondary to road freight. More than 80% of freight tonnes lifted in Britain go by road,according to the D1T.

Road freight will remain freight transport king in the UK for the foreseeable future.The only question is how large a supporting role will be played by trains and ships. •


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