Scope is there to fill freight trains and take hundreds of lorries off the A9 every day

Infrastructure to suit long trains is key to rail freight success, says David Spaven

Big headlines were generated last month by news of Scottish Government plans to make the A9 Scotland’s first ‘fully electric-enabled’ highway. However, while the use of electric vehicles in and around cities is a sensible and achievable target, details are sketchy as to how electric technology can be applied to the long journeys travelled by cars and vans along the A9 and beyond. And the prospect of seeing 44-tonne electric lorries wafting silently over Druimuachdar Summit is distant indeed.

In contrast, the much neglected parallel railway – the Highland Main Line from Perth to Inverness – is crying out for investment to allow it to play a much bigger role in helping the Scottish Government to achieve ambitious low-carbon targets. Elec- of the railway should be a core objective, as part of a rolling programme across Scotland, so that the excellent (but 40-year old) High Speed Trains about to be introduced on express routes can be replaced in ten years’ time by state-of-the-art electric trains.

So what can be done in the short to medium term to help rail freight compete more effectively against trucks which generate three to four times as much CO2 for every load moved? Unlike the A9 – where dualling is steadily progressing, and road hauliers now enjoy Central Belt to Inverness transits half an hour faster as a result of raising the HGV speed limit from 40 to 50mph – the railway has suffered from disinvestment over the last 40 years. Two thirds of the 118-mile line is single track, and key crossing loops were taken out in 1980s’ rationalisation schemes.

However, in 2008, the Scottish Government’s ‘Strategic Transport Projects review’ identified upgrading the Highland Main Line as a national priority. Investment of between £200m and £400m was envisaged – extending double track, building more crossing loops and improving signalling – yet almost 10 years later, nothing has been delivered on the ground. Meanwhile, although the A9 was completely rebuilt in the 1970s and 80s, the first tranches of a further £3 billion investment in the road have already been spent.

A key way to achieve ‘more efficient freight operations’ – the revised, vague objective set out for the railway by Government in 2012 – is to provide the infrastructure to allow rail haul- iers to operate the longest possible trains. The modern Class 66 locomotives which haul the daily Stobart / Tesco container train from Central Scotland to Inverness have enough power to pull a train of 28 containers – the equivalent of 28 lorries – but the lack of long crossing loops restricts the operation to just 20 containers. So rail is 30% less efficient than it should be, and as A9 dualling progresses, the danger is that instead of freight traffic switching from road to rail – the Scottish Government’s objective – the modal switch will be in the opposite direction, increasing carbon emissions!

The current drastically scaled-back plans for the Highland Main Line envisage extended crossing loop at Aviemore – in principal a very good idea – but likely to deliver little bentrification

efit for rail freight in practice, as this loop will be used for most of the day to ‘cross’ an enhanced frequency of passenger trains. Capacity for long freight trains will only be available in the night – which won’t necessarily suit customers, and when rail engineers need access to the single track for maintenance.

In its defence, the Scottish Government is making noises about further improvements in a ‘next phase’ of rail upgrading after 2019 – but how long can the freight railway afford to wait, without seeing serious A9-inflicted damage to its existing core business?

There are also enormous tranches of potential new rail business which could be realised by a seriously upgraded Highland Main Line. Some 50,000 laden whisky lorries travel the A9 every year, and a share of this, together with other Speyside food and drink products, could providethe base load for a new train from Elgin and/or Keith to the Central Belt – cutting carbon and road accidents.

While rail has had much success in attracting supermarket traffic from the roads over the last two decades – by offering a high-quality, timetabled service – all the traffic carried is ‘ambient’, ie not temperaturecontrolled. The big prize for rail is to penetrate the chilled and frozen food markets, but this will require infrastructure investment to allow wider refrigerated containers to pass through ‘gauge-constrained’ Victorian tunnels and overbridges.

Together with timber and wood products, and inbound grain, malt and empty casks for the whisky industry, there is scope to generate enough rail traffic to fill many more freight trains than the current two daily – and in so doing, to take hundreds of heavy lorries off the A9 every day. But to achieve that highly desirable objective we need a ‘fully enabled’ railway – fit for the 21st century. David Spaven, Scottish Representative, Rail Freight Group