Rail as a silver bullet? Not so fast

For this week’s commentary, FCZ’s Andy Salter contemplates whether it’s time to revisit the case for rail freight in the race to decarbonise road transport, particularly given the new government’s penchant for rail at the moment.

 “We need to see freight as a system, rather than a series of modes.” 

 We’ve heard this, or something similar, articulated by various policy makers over the years, usually in a bid to shift the discussion from road freight to rail freight. It would appear, under the current regime, rail is back up the priority hierarchy, and so worth another look in terms of its decarbonisation potential. Indeed, the benefits are obvious; shift the truck loads to rail, pulled by one electric locomotive and we can remove thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions from freight movements in one swoop.

DP World, in its modal shift programme, has demonstrated what can be possible if you incentivise rail over road for port container movements. The MSP, launched in September 2023, incentivises customers to move containers by rail instead of road. Since its inception, the programme has increased the share of rail freight at DP World Southampton from 21% to over 30%, with a target to reach 40% by 2026. It’s taken over 64,000 truck journeys off the roads and onto rail and is claimed to have saved 17,000 tonnes of co2.   

This is positive stuff and a big round of applause for everyone involved. The programme demonstrates what can be possible when you start shifting the financial balance in favour of one mode over another through fiscal incentives, or disincentives depending on your point of view, and it hasn’t required any government intervention. 

Great, so let’s roll it out everywhere, implement a carbon tax for road freight journeys over 140 miles and get the freight trains rolling…we hear (some) of you say.

Before we get too carried away, let’s return to our opening quote “freight as a system, not as a mode”. We shouldn’t be lulled into thinking we can just shift all the freight onto the rail. For starters, building the extra rail infrastructure to cope with the demand would be a project to rival the upgrading of the national electric grid for our electrification journey ahead and let’s face it, we don’t have a great record of building new railways since the Victorian era at least.

Knowing how competitive the logistics sector is, the smart operators are already heavily invested in rail and are using the mode where its practical, delivering operational efficiency and saving carbon. We also know those who are active in the space are very familiar with the capacity constraints which exist across the network and the many bottlenecks. You don’t spend too long in the company of the rail freight community before you come across “Ely Junction” as one such strangulation point on the ambitions.

Rail has an important place in the freight decarbonisation journey, but to hang it out there as the panacea in the route to Net Zero is misleading and shouldn’t be seen as a distraction in achieving the greater goal of decarbonising the UK truck fleet, nor as a means to deprioritise the commercial vehicle and road freight sector by government. Even with a highly functioning rail sector, trucks will be required for final delivery and there are a lot of truck miles which can never be replaced by trains.

 We’re concerned, that under the current government, road freight is being shuffled down the pecking order. “Sticking it all on the rails”, is as naïve as thinking the truck sector can be electrified in the next 10 years without some serious disruption. “Freight as a system” is great as a means of conceptualising the sector, but it must not be forgotten that freight and the movement thereof, is the lifeblood which keeps society fed and clothed and without an efficient and functioning system in place, the much-vaunted economic growth is going to be very difficult to achieve.

Decarbonising road freight, for the vast majority, will involve shifting the fleet to low or Zero carbon energy sources – anything else is just tinkering at the edges, so let’s get on with it.