Rail freight ‘can’t afford to stop’ because of wind or rain, company boss says at IMechE event

Economic growth, decarbonisation, supply chain resilience – rail freight could help the government hit many of its targets. So why is the amount of goods travelling by rail freight falling each year, asked an industry boss at a recent IMechE event.

“UK rail was born to deliver rail freight”, said Tim Shoveller, chair of Heavy Haul Rail, at Rail Freight 2026 last week (16 September). It can help solve pressing issues, he claimed – “and yet, at the same time, we have to address an uncomfortable reality, which is that whilst the environmental case is compelling, the commercial case is not as straightforward, and that's really important if we want to make sure that rail freight plays its part in the future of our economy.”

The event, held at the institution’s One Birdcage Walk headquarters in Westminster, aimed to “inject some enthusiasm” building on the announcement of a new government target the previous week, chair Rebeka Sellick told attendees. Great British Railways will be tasked with increasing rail freight by at least 40% by 2040, on the way to 75% by 2050. “How are we going to do that collectively? Where's our engineering input into that vision?” Sellick asked.

Shoveller set out some possibilities, in what Sellick called a “call to arms for the engineering community”. “Engineers don't just solve today's problems; they create tomorrow's possibilities,” Shoveller said.

Weather-related disruption is a key area where engineers can help freight fulfil its potential, according to Shoveller. While he said that an increased focus on safety is understandable in response to accidents such as the derailment at Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, in which three passengers died after their train hit a landslip, he claimed that increased disruption from regulations had been normalised as “what happens on the railway”.

“One of the things which is fundamental to winning new traffic for rail is the ability to guarantee the train is going to get there, and yet so often now our customers are faced with the train not arriving – not just whether it's 10 minutes late, or 30 minutes late, it's not going to arrive at all because it's windy and we've decided to close the railway because we're worried about the wind speeds, or it’s rained a lot,” he said.

“My argument is, and has always been, we can keep those trains going, we can slow them down, but ultimately can't afford to stop because that undermines fundamentally that ability to move the heavy loads… If the railway doesn't serve the purpose it's built for, and the economics of it mean that it can no longer win traffic from road, then actually that's not a bright future for the railway. It becomes a self-defeating, vicious circle.”

He gave the example of Chipping Sodbury cutting on the line from Swindon to Cardiff, which had been particularly prone to flooding (Network Rail completed work including track renewals and drainage improvements earlier this year), requiring diversions via Bath.

“You might not want to run a very expensive passenger train through those floods, but you can certainly run one of our trains through slowly,” he said. “You haven't done a good safety job if you just say stop. The professional engineers, professional operators keep trains moving safely when things have gone wrong.”

Presentations at the event showed ways that digitalisation can aid decarbonisation, including the chance to extend maintenance regimes if operators know an asset can safely run more miles before refurbishment. Rolling stock highlighted at the event included the iWagon, described as “the UK’s first digital freight wagon” by VTG Rail UK. Technologies incorporated include a wheel flat prevention system, designed to improve whole-life wheel and rail costs, and built-in brake condition monitoring.

Balancing environmental and economic concerns will involve engineers working with commercial colleagues to make sure that rail freight is affordable, Shoveller said, especially given the UK is an “outlier” on cost compared to European countries such as Poland, Germany or the Netherlands.

The event, which featured multiple impromptu and in-depth discussions between speakers and the audience, covered both industry overviews and a lot of engineering content, said Sellick, immediate past-chair of IMechE’s Railway Division. Some of the most significant opportunities for engineering input to growing freight are “pointing out the very obvious”, she said to Professional Engineering. “It is not sensible to make traction electricity more expensive than diesel, when other countries cap it, nor to encourage bits of the railway to stay more capacity-constrained, by using strategic investment.”

She added: “Tim explained how to keep running a railway safely, sometimes it's just a matter of how slowly you need to go.” Engineers can provide quantified risk management arguments to enable continued operation after extreme weather such as flooding, she said.

While digitalisation can enable better ways of working, much of the event focused on fundamental engineering considerations, such as Wheel Impact Load Detector (Wild) for condition-monitoring of wheelsets and RSSB research on braking when adhesion is poor. This included PhD student Xuwen Jia’s presentation about better understanding freight braking curves and how they can be optimised.

IMechE has an important role in highlighting “what good looks like”, Sellick said. Tim Ward, interoperability manager at the Office of Rail and Road, spoke about good practice in getting trains authorised for service, while speakers from GB Railfreight and Rail Operations Group set out how they have introduced new locomotives and the benefits they bring, which they said included higher speeds, increased flexibility and lower costs.

“That, I think, is very effective for the institution, to provide that space for networking and genuinely learning lessons from the challenges that people had to overcome,” Sellick said.