Rail freight park

Plans outlined for new £260m rail freight park at Mossend, with hopes that each train will take 90 HGVs off the road.

PLANS for a new electrified railhead in Mossend, Scotland, were outlined at the Multimodal trade show at the NEC in Birmingham on April 4.

It is hoped the £260 million Mossend International Railfreight Park (MIRP) project will deliver up to 2,700 full-time jobs and 2,200 construction jobs, and that each train could take 90 HGVs off the roads.

Andrew Stirling, of PD Stirling (PDS), said: “There are 12,500 44-tonne HGVs using the M74 to Scotland and another 3,0004,000 coming up the East Coast along the A1.” He believes some of that could “transfer to rail if the costs can be reduced by exploiting longer trains”.

PDS has been talking to all the major rail freight operators to evaluate the possibility of shared services.

Stirling said: “Delays in upgrading the M8, due to be completed in March but now likely to be ready in December, is also vital to the MIRP project as this will give trucks road access to the site.”

He added: “We will build new infrastructure with eight 800m sidings and we aim to turn around a full train - unloading and reloading

it - in two hours.” Fully autonomous overhead gantry cranes will be used to unload and load.

The site received planning permission in principle in August 2015, but a legal issue has delayed the project.

The process started in 2009, and the plans will allow it to accept 775-metre trains carrying in the region of 55 full-length containers. PDS hopes it can increase the number of containers coming to Scotland by rail from the current 460 a day to 2,400.

Of the rail freight companies, only Freightliner, which was a sponsor, attended the event. However, many of the logistics companies exhibiting were optimistic about growth using rail.