“Get real” - Berkeley
Rail Freight Group Chairman tells RAIL the freight industry needs to “get real” on delivery targets.
THE rail freight industry needs to “get real” when it comes to delivery targets from clients.
So says Rail Freight Group (RFG) Chairman Lord Berkley, who told
RAIL he believes the industry is behind the curve compared with road haulage companies.
“If you talk to car companies like Toyota, they have a thousand trucks a week going into its plant, mostly coming across the Channel. Why the hell aren’t they going by rail?” he said.
“When they say they want everything arriving within half an hour, the railway sector needs to catch up with that. The railway industry is behind on this - one of the things I’ve been hammering on for years is ‘get real’.
“Railways can do it [transport goods] at night, motorways can do it at night. But the logistics industry doesn’t like doing everything at night - they want to do things during the day because everyone wants a 24/7 just-in-time delivery.”
Like many other senior rail freight leaders, Berkeley was vocal about former National Infrastructure Commission chairman Andrew Adonis’ comments on rail freight, telling RAIL he was “very annoyed” when Adonis suggested platooning lorries should take the place of rail in transporting cargo ( RAIL 841).
“We sent him a number of letters,” Berkeley said. “He’s resigned from the NIC, and the study will continue and the RFG will participate in it. He still wants us to go and look at his platooning project in Milton Keynes. It’s all very interesting, but we should be competing on quality and price, and on a level playing field. The playing field is not level with roads at the moment, with fuel duties and things.”
Berkeley continued: “There has to be a solution to all of this. I personally think platooning would be good where there’s no railway, but the cost of the transfer from one to the other is very, very high.
“Platooning is an interesting idea. Philip Roe [DHL Managing Director] said it will reduce the fuel consumption, but I think there is a ploy to reduce the cost of labour.
“The problem with platooning is two-fold. What happens at the beginning and at the end? You are going to have to have places where you can disconnect the platoon and get the cargo into a single vehicle with a driver. The second one is to do with emissions. And there’s also congestion to consider.”
Berkeley told RAIL that rail freight “is doing alright” at the moment, and that he remains optimistic for the future.
“The container business is going quite well and is growing, as is the construction sector with its building materials. Automotive is doing alright, while coal is plummeting.
“Then there’s a fuss over biomass because the regulator wants to put a premium on biomass. But biomass is actually doing quite well.”
He concluded: “We’ve also got to do more work on city centre deliveries, though.”