HSTs under debate
Using ex-passenger HSTs and Mk 3 coaches to carry freight could “wipe the floor” with road competition.
THE freight market could be “cracked wide open” if off-lease High Speed Trains are used to carry express freight, claims Intermodality UK Managing Director Nick Gallop.
Speaking exclusively to RAIL, Gallop said a plan to use ex-passenger HSTs and Mk 3 coaches to carry parcels could “wipe the floor” with the road competition.
RAIL first revealed that GB Railfreight was interested in using redundant HSTs to meet customers’ same-day delivery demand last year ( RAIL 820).
These plans had to be postponed owing to late-running electrification works, meaning that the stock couldn’t become available as soon as was originally hoped. However, Gallop, who also works as Intercity-Freight’s Development Director, said that in the past year he has been lobbying to ensure spare HSTs won’t all be going for scrap without warning.
“We were hopeful we would have seen something by now, but rail projects sometimes take way too long to bring on-stream for all sorts of reasons,” he told RAIL.
“At the moment, the leasing companies and train operating companies [TOCs] are working out how many of the HST sets they want to keep in passenger use. What we’re looking to do with things like HSTs is to be there as the goalkeeper of last resort - if we see any signs that they’re going to be scrapped, we will try and gain interest from the industry and say ‘would you be interested in a 125mph high-speed diesel delivery vehicle? If you’re interested, apply to that person before they get turned into razor blades’.”
Gallop added there is also potential for the HSTs to continue to carry passengers, albeit at a cut price to a traditional overnight service. This could help the railways appeal to a new demographic, using the Adaptable Carriage technology ( RAIL 847).
“The Sleeper is of a certain standard - there are people who are interested in an overnight solution who may not want to afford to pay for a Sleeper. What could you do? You could run something that runs parallel or alongside the Sleeper on those routes, subject to engineering works,” he explained.
“We could be a bit like Megabus or easy Jet, whereby it [the express freight service] is deliberately segmented away from the classic Sleeper offering so it isn’t going to disturb their numbers, but it gives the market something they didn’t know they could have. This isn’t about nicking traffic from existing providers - this is opening up a huge new market with stuff that is coming off-lease in the hundreds, if not thousands.”
Gallop has been heavily involved in the Government-backed 42 Technology-developed Adaptable Carriage project. He believes that this technology, combined with a growing negative attitude towards road transport emissions and several hundred vehicles coming off-lease at the same time, creates a unique opportunity.
“It’s one of those rare occasions where all the planets seem to be coming into alignment, but my God we’re going to have to move very quickly because they can move out of alignment again,” he said.
He called for the industry to get behind his plans, saying: “The railway industry tends to be conservative and reactionary to new ideas. It needs the Rail Delivery Group, the freight operators and the TOCs to go ‘Amazon, rest of the world, we’re open for business’.
“When you look at the size of the market with the billions of parcels that are moved around the UK by truck, the fact is that rail is perfectly capable of doing that. We have a whole host of cities that are lining up to say ‘Yeah, we’ll work with you, we’ll work with the rail industry’, which will make it work. It improves the delivery performance to and from city centres and drives down the emissions.”