NR’s scrap challenge
Paul Stephen turns the spotlight on the important but often unseen work of Network Rail’s materials recovery team
Network Rail’s materials recovery team in action
Network Rail is responsible for over 20,000 miles of track and is, therefore, engaged in the continual cycle of both its renewal and repair.
With that comes a large amount of potential waste - where track, sleepers and ballast have become redundant - or an opportunity for still-serviceable track material to be redeployed elsewhere on the network.
In the last financial year alone (2015/16), NR reports that it saved itself an estimated £15.5 million by either re-using rail or selling it on to approved scrap dealers.
In addition to being an environmentally responsible policy, the financial prudence of the programme is particularly welcome at a time when NR is trying to raise funds from alternative sources, including its £1.8bn asset disposal strategy.
Other benefits brought about by removing materials from where they are usually discarded lineside by track engineers, is a much tidier appearance for the railway, and improved safety for trackside workers.
Rail recovery is a collaborative effort. Collections are arranged by local delivery units – the teams responsible for the dayto-day maintenance of individual stretches of track – and carried out by one of eight NR materials recovery teams. It is then delivered to one of three handling depots at Whitemoor, Westbury and Crewe – to be sorted and graded.
Materials found to be of a suitable quality are then recycled back into the network for use by NR’s National Supply Chain, and anything else of value is sold to external companies.
Local delivery units are incentivised to arrange for recoveries (and the removal of legacy rail that may have remained lineside after a project carried out years previously) by being credited for every unit recovered. For instance, when 950 tonnes of scrap rail was recovered from Stableford near Stafford last year due to a re-railing project on the West Coast Main Line, the Stafford delivery unit was credited £177,000 by NR’s National Supply Chain. Scotland’s route team was credited just over £ 350,000 when it mapped all the legacy rail on its network, and identified 2,000 tonnes for removal.
Logistics firm DHL manages the hiring of specialist vehicles to remove the rail by road and then delivery of it to the handling depots, if delivery cannot be made by rail. Transporting material by rail requires a possession of the line, which is not alwa
possible unless it is pre-planned to coincide with a parallel project.
Typically, a recovery job might involve 200 tonnes of rail, requiring eight or nine 25 tonne-capacity trucks. Redundant rail is stacked far enough from the running lines for its recovery not to interfere with day-to-day railway operations.
The largest of the three handling centres is NR’s national track materials recycling centre at Whitemoor Yard in March, Cambridgeshire. Opened in 2011, it covers 40 hectares and handles more than 40% of all materials recovered from the entire network per year. That equates to more than 500 miles of rail, 800 switches and crossings and 50,000 tonnes of contaminated ballast. It’s estimated that the re-use of that ballast alone saves NR approximately £ 5m a year in landfill tax.
Building the recycling centre reversed a period of decline for Whitemoor, a marshalling yard (once one of the largest in the world) that had closed in 1990 and become derelict. Eventually, half of the original site was sold off as a site for Whitemoor Prison. The reopening of the yard created 40 new jobs and £ 2m of other benefits, including new cycle paths and link roads, and a resignalling of the railway around March which has improved the reliability of passenger and freight trains running between Ely and Peterborough.
Glen Kelly, NR’s business support manager in charge of material handling depots, told
RAIL: “Every year we seem to collect more track material than the previous one. One of Mark Carne’s first tasks (after becoming NR chief executive in January 2014) was to clean up the railway, which caused a surge in demand for our services on station approaches and the like.
“There are a lot of parties involved in the process, but everyone works together. The recovery teams are very experienced in making the system extremely resilient.
“Another benefit of doing it this way is that we shield the individual delivery units from the price of scrap. We pay out a flat rate and then we take the risk on the market, but we can stockpile scrap to make the most of that.”
Trevor Boyd, project manager at NR’s Swindon delivery unit added: “As the project manager and scrap recovery champion for Swindon delivery unit, I called upon the services of the Western materials recovery team. Alongside the Swindon track managers we had a collaborative programme to clear as much scrap metal as possible during the 2015/16 financial year.
“At the end of the year we exceeded our target by 137%. The collaboration worked extremely well and is proving to have the same effect this year with targets again being exceeded ”
We pay out a flat rate and then we take the risk on the market, but we can stockpile scrap to make the most of that.