Freight trains help UK supply crisis but face Felixstowe port
frustrations | Website Hosting Plans
byAlbert D. Beard-
0
Jim Cockburn-Powell didn’t want to be a train driver when he was a boy. He fancied racing motorbikes and becoming world speedway champion. But sitting in the cab of a diesel locomotive, hauling wagons of supermarket goods from Daventry to Crewe at up to 75mph, his job with Direct Rail Services has a degree of glamour today. His double-engine train has attracted trainspotters to every station we pass through, photographing as he gives them a wave.
This choice of “loco” is a sign of the times, however. Normally a greener electric train would be used for this service. But the price that rail companies are charged for power by Network Rail has surged so much – by 210 per cent, even more than the cost of fuel – that freight companies have switched to more polluting diesels.
Around one tenth of all inland freight transportation in the UK is carried by rail, moving goods worth about £30bn every year – and with Britain’s supply chain problems, trains like Jim’s are even more important right now as an alternative to lorries for hauls of 150 miles or more. As Jim points out: “I’m saving the work of 34 HGV drivers with this train today.”
“With the current HGV driver shortage, the role of rail freight has never been more crucial in transporting goods and keeping supermarket shelves stocked,” Andy Bagnall, Director General of the Rail Delivery Group, has said – and now the industry is calling for more investment to help make Britain’s logistics more efficient and environmentally friendly.
Jim Cockburn-Powell at the controls his freight train, transporting Sainsbury’s goods from the DIRFT hub in Daventry, Northamptonshire, to Crewe (Photo: Rob Hastings)
Right now, train operators are doing their best to relieve pressure at Felixstowe, the nation’s biggest deep-sea port, where a shortage of lorries to take goods away has led to ships being diverted abroad and threatening supplies of toys and household goods for Christmas.
Around 38 freight trains run in and out of Felixstowe every day, the maximum possible, and companies are doing their best at the moment to fill every single wagon – but the rail infrastructure badly needs upgrading.
“Felixstowe very oddly still has a single track railway,” John Smith, founder and CEO of GB Railfreight, tells i. “That’s bizarre when you consider the size of the port”.
One quarter of all the containers that arrive at our docks are taken inland by rail. “We need to move boxes off the dock to wherever they’re going quickly, and rail offers a real solution,” says Smith. “But the network requires investment, we need some infrastructure strengthening.”
Easing the choke point at Felixstowe with a second track would be hard, with houses backing onto much of the line. But increasing capacity in the nearby network has long been the “number-one campaign priority” for the industry, says Maggie Simpson, director general of the Rail Freight Group which lobbies on behalf of the companies.
Plans for a new passenger station at Soham could actually slow down the movement of imports from Felixstowe, though Simpson hopes a compromise can be found.
Jim Cockburn-Powell’s locomotive on our journey is a Class 66 diesel (Photo: Rob Hastings)
Though rail offers a solution to supply chain problems, a high-ranking industry insider says companies have deep frustrations about the Government’s refusal to heed warnings about shortages in the wider economy, partly caused by ending freedom of movement for EU workers.
“Do I think the Government ignored what business was telling them? Yes, bluntly,” they say.
“Right from 2016 onwards, they probably believed that business and even their own officials were trying to thwart Brexit, so they wouldn’t listen.”
Jim Cockburn-Powell, 54, has been a train driver for 15 years. Thankfully, he doesn’t have to spend nights away from home in his role with Direct Rail Services, but his job started at 4:12 this morning and it can involve long, unsociable hours. He gets a three-day weekend in exchange, however, and the job is well paid – the average salary for a driver is £54,000.
Along with four tankers of refrigeration gases, most of Jim’s load today contains goods from the mega DIRFT terminal in Northamptonshire bound for Sainsbury’s stores in Scotland. Asda also uses rail to move its products to stores, and Tesco is now expanding its use of trains by nearly 40 per cent.
Jim Cockburn-Powell leaves his train at Crewe, switching with another driver (Photo: Rob Hastings)
Direct Rail Services, which has a fleet of 100 locomotives and moves 140,000 containers a year, was founded in 1994 to carry nuclear fuel and waste. It has since diversified into carrying all kinds of goods, but remains publicly owned.
With most services starting and finishing out of sight, and as many run at night to avoid network congestion caused by passenger trains, Jim believes that cargo trains are a “Cinderella service” that many people are unaware of.
Camaraderie is a big appeal for working on the railways, he says, but it can be a job of extremes.
“You’ve got to like your own company, but you’ve also got to be social. You go from being all on your own – where it’s just you, your train and the signals – to being in a mess room where people are taking the mick out of each other quite savagely sometimes.”
One of the biggest skills for drivers is learning their routes, knowing precisely where signals and bends are located, which can take weeks. This allows them to drive safely at night and in fog.
Supermarket supplies
Rail is “the umbilical cord that connects the port with the inland warehouse, the quarry with the construction site, the steel works with the car factory. We are integral to huge parts of the country’s economy,” says Smith.
To keep things moving, rail is now becoming increasingly integrated with road. Smith says that around five of the trains that GB Railfreight runs out of Felixstowe every day are contracted to a road haulage company, with trains carrying goods on the longest leg of their distribution journeys to a terminal inland, where they are then loaded onto HGVs for shorter individual trips to their final destinations. This increases speed and allows road haulage companies to save their drivers for essential work.
Increasingly, containers are packed so that lorries at a train’s final destination can take them straight to supermarkets. Importing and distributing goods by rail has “helped us during the HGV challenges”, Tesco’s chief executive Ken Murphy said earlier this month. He plans to increase the number of containers it moves by track every year from 65,000 by 90,000 before Christmas.
Inside the Class 66 freight train locomotive cab (Photo: Rob Hastings)
Tesco’s depot in Barking, east London, receives five train loads of fruit and vegetables from Valencia in western Spain every week, full of oranges, tomatoes and other items in refrigerated containers. This journey takes four days, the same as it would by lorry, but it is hoped that track improvements will soon save a day. It is planning to launch four more routes, including one from London to Scotland.
“You’re not going to get a freight train to your front door with your Amazon parcel, or even to your local shop,” says Simpson, “but a lot of the goods that are arriving at your front door will have been on a train at some point.”
Though most rail freight companies are private, they rely on the Government-funded Network Rail to maintain and improve the network. They are urging the Government to stay committed to HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail, which would allow more freight to run elsewhere.
The Union Pacific Big Boy steam engine, built in the US in the 1940s, weighed nearly 550,000kg together with its tender – heavier than a fully loaded Boeing 747 airliner. These days, a single General Electric Evolution diesel-electric model has the power to haul the equivalent of 170 jumbo jets.
Length
In Australia in 2011, a train with eight locomotives and 682 wagons set the record as the world’s longest, stretching to 4.5 miles long. Carrying iron ore, it weighed just shy of 100,000 tonnes and travelled 170 miles with a single driver. If you were stopped at a level crossing, you’d need to wait around eight minutes for it to pass by. In Britain, the maximum legal train length is 775m, still more than seven football pitches long.
Distance
The longest freight train journey in the world travels from Yiwu on China’s east coast to Madrid, Spain, covering 8,100 miles. Another service from Yiwu runs to Barking. The first direct rail freight service from China to the UK arrived in 2017 after an 18-day trip.
It transported 34 containers of clothes, bags and household goods 7,500 miles. Locomotives and wagons had to be swapped twice because of different rail gauges on the route. The operator said the journey was two weeks quicker than a sea voyage and prices were half that of flying the cargo.
Green credentials
The world’s first battery-electric freight train was unveiled in the US last month. A locomotive fueled by hydro-treated vegetable oil went on show at Glasgow Central station ahead of the city hosting the COP 26 climate summit in November.
Environmental benefits
Ahead of the COP 26 climate change summit in Glasgow next month, the environmental benefits of trains are also on the agenda.
In 2019, 17 per cent of the UK transport sector’s greenhouse gas emissions came from HGVs, compared to 0.3 per cent from rail freight.
Even with a diesel engine, carrying one tonne of goods by rail instead of road reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 76 per cent on average – rising to 99 per cent with electric locos – and rail effectively removes 7 million lorries from the roads every year.
The first Class 66 locomotives were built in 1998 (Photo: Rob Hastings)
“To realise its commitment to net zero by 2050 and support economic growth, government should set an ambitious target to encourage the shifting of goods from road to rail,” says Bagnall.
Rail could become even greener if diesel trains can be phased out, but to achieve this Simpson says that government help is needed to electrify more of the network. This does not have to mean huge works – she points out that electric freight trains could run all the way from the Thames Estuary to Scotland if just a three-mile stretch of track outside London Gateway Port could be given power lines. Until then, only diesels can travel the route.
Railways are one of the greenest ways to move goods (Photo: Rob Hastings)
A start-up company, Varamis, is aiming to move parcels and light goods between city hubs on all-electric routes by the end of the year, starting with a renovated passenger train running between Birmingham and Glasgow.
Its founder, Phil Read, says that rail is attractive for bringing goods into city centres, as it cuts down on air pollution and reduces congestion on busy streets.
He hopes that electric vans and courier bikes would also be used for final deliveries to customers doors in future, to make the service even more environmentally friendly.
In the short term, however, cheaper electricity is all that’s needed for Jim and other drivers to get back on track with cleaner electric locomotives to keep Britain moving in the greenest way possible.
