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Road and rail may not be so interchangeable
Page 24
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Recent DfT transport statistics help answer the question of whether to move freight from one mode to the other. Dylan Gray reports.
N THE PAST COUPLE of weeks the Department for Transport as released its Transport Statistics 2007 document, which overs almost all topics relating to transport in the UK from )ublic services to private cars and aviation.
More relevant to most CM readers is the section on freight. -here is plenty of data to chose from though in this issue ye focus on the types of loads (or 'commodity groups', as the eport calls them) predominately carried by each transport node, and the average distance that vehicles travel to deliver he country's vital goods. This provides a clearer picture for hose involved in the road vs rail debate.
Transport through pipelines is mentioned, but is not directly :omparable with road and rail as it transports only petroleum )roducts and in significantly greater quantities. Therefore our ocus will be on the other modes.
iolid fuel on rail
he only commodity with a significantly bigger presence on ail than road is solid mineral fuels, with 8.8bn tonne-kilometres t-km) moved by rail and 1.3bn t-km by road. Rail also carries small percentage of petroleum products, metal products, n Onerals and building materials.
While road transport carries marginally more petroleum goducts and metal products than rail, it is dominant in he minerals and building materials sector, completing a itaggering 26.6bn t-km in 2006. This is the road transport's hird-largest sector. In second place is foodstuffs and tnimal fodder with 36.3bn t-km, while in first place is nachinery, transport, equipment, manufactured articles and niscellaneous articles with 67.3bn t-km.
Commodities such as chemicals, fertilisers, ores and metal vaste, foodstuffs and animal fodder, and agricultural products Ind live animals have no presence on the rail network.
Much is being made by rail freight campaigners about shifting certain )ads from road to rail to cut congestion on our roads. While this idea dill surely have some benefits, it also has some major complications. )ne of the questions would have to be 'what types of load should be aken off the roads?'.
Campaigners will argue that it should be the loads that do the longest )urneys. The average journey of all goods vehicles is 86km. Articulated ehicles, which will very often be on the longer trunking runs, have an average journey of around 120km. Is this worth the switch to rail?
One type of vehicle that definitely cannot be replaced by rail is the rigid: the average distance travelled by rigid goods vehicles is only 43km.
The table above shows that over the past three years there has been no significant change in the distances travelled by different-sized goods vehicles. If longer, heavier vehicles (LHVs) were introduced, the picture could changebut without their introduction or a major push to switch to rail, the figures will stay pretty similar in the foreseeable future.