UK rail freight ready to relieve road gridlocks

Ben Perry - Britain's resilient rail freight industry, while much smaller than the road haulage sector, might play a key role in keeping vital, but stranded goods on the move.

Lorries are stuck in long lines heading to and from the Channel port of Dover on England's south coast, as companies try to stockpile goods before the Brexit transition period ends on 31 December.

The situation has been exacerbated by countries shutting their borders to Britain to contain a fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus.

Freightliner Group, a leading rail company that picks up large containers from UK ports and transports them by train to inland terminals, is waiting in the wings.

The company could be called upon to transport extra produce across Britain should businesses caught up in the Dover queues decide to ferry their goods to other ports.

"What we may start seeing is the impact of goods being moved to other deep seaports around Britain," Freightliner's head of rail strategy, Peter Graham, told AFP.

Its longest trains, which are 775 metres long and carry around 60 containers, are currently transporting goods north from the English port of Southampton.

‘LESS AFFECTED’

While lockdown restrictions have sharply curtailed Britain's passenger rail traffic, freight trains are running at around pre-pandemic levels with vital goods such as protective equipment needed by hospitals.

Freight trains have been affected "less than the passenger rail sector, thankfully", said Maggie Simpson, director general of trade body Rail Freight Group, though she added that the petro-chemical sector was still "a bit volatile".

"Global oil use isn't what it was. It's come back up a bit now but we're not moving as much aviation fuel for example," she told AFP.

Simpson said that with the first UK lockdown in late March, Britain's rail freight volume "dropped pretty much overnight to about 50 percent" of what it would normally have been.

"But there was quite a resilient" recovery, said Graham.

And regardless of the situation at Dover, post-Brexit processes will allow trains that come from France through the Channel Tunnel to clear customs at an inland UK terminal.

This could also benefit the rail freight sector amid fears of continued long delays for lorries at ports once Britain leaves the EU single market and customs unions on 1 January.

MORE POPULAR

"We are seeing people starting to think a little bit differently about their supply chain ... you can see some businesses starting to relocate away" from Dover, Simpson said.

Since the Brexit referendum in 2016 there has been an increase in goods being picked up by freight at ports further north along England's eastern coastline, she said.

"People, for example, who might have come from Belgium or Germany or Poland on a lorry via Dover aren't" any more.

Transporting goods by train is gaining in popularity also owing to the environmental benefits.

A freight train can carry the same volume of goods as 76 heavy goods vehicles, the rail industry claims.

Freight's rise in fortunes is in sharp contrast to Britain's passenger trains, which are much less crowded as millions of office workers now often do their jobs from home.

Around 35 million UK rail journeys were made in the second quarter of 2020, down from more than 400 million a year earlier, to levels last seen in the mid-19th century, according to the Office of Rail and Road. – Nampa/AFP