Rail Freight Challenge: Rail Fights Back
Abstract
It is all too easy to forget how close Britain came to losing its rail freight services completely, worse still that the nation took the decline as inevitable. While dusting off some railway magazines from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, I was struck by how full the news pages were with closure notices for local freight yards, regional marshalling yards, private sidings and the trains that served them. At the time, all one could hope for was that somehow, things would turn for the better again.
Fortunately, conditions have become more favourable again for rail, with road haulage shadowed by congestion and increasing journey times, just as the freight market is moving towards longer average lengths of haul. As the theoretical champion of heavy and long-distance surface haulage, more of the market is moving into rail’s sights. Yet post-privatisation, the rail freight companies have found themselves lacking the right amount of the right things – locomotives, wagons, terminals, staff, systems – and customers!