R A I LT R AC K - The Railways Archive

freight
We are building on
the opportunities that
we have identified to
improve the transfer
of freight between
road and rail
92
7.6 continued 7.7
We have identified a further 17 route sections from our
own and other property portfolios that we may reopen in
the next few years (see Table F).Protecting disused sites and
terminals is a vital challenge to everyone involved in the rail
freight industry. As the Sustainable Distribution document
notes it is particularly important that the relevant planning
guidance recognises the need to retain locations where
there is a realistic prospect of future traffic.
From the first phase of our work with the Highways
Agency in England and the National Roads Directorate in
Scotland, we are building on the opportunities that we have
identified to improve the transfer of freight between road
and rail. We support the policy of a national framework for
major freight interchanges.Our role is to secure suitable
locations,facilitate their connection to our network and the
agencies trunk road network, and to develop them provided
that there is a sensible commercial opportunity and to the
extent that others do not take the lead on individual
projects.
To underpin this development work and to enable local
authorities to contribute further to the development of rail
freight opportunities, we will be shortly publishing a new Rail
Freight Reference Bookin partnership with representatives of
local authorities and the freight operators.
7.7 Progress with our Ten-Point Plan
In April 1997, we summarised our initial plans to develop rail
freight in a Ten-Point Plan.Since then,the industry has made
enormous progress.As we have set out below, some of the
issues we identified in the Plan have been addressed,while
new challenges have arisen.
1. Reduction in costs
On the basis that we have previously measured our costs,
we have continued to make progress in reducing them.Our
unit prices to freight customers fell by 7.9% last year while
our unit costs fell by 9.7% (see Table G opposite).
However, during the year, we have reviewed in more
detail the composition of the fixed and variable costs that
we incur in handling particular types of rail freight traffic on
certain routes.Although the overall totals of prices and costs
are in line with each other, and our pricing structures are
consistent with the Rail Regulator policies, we may need to
restructure future track access arrangements to better
reflect our new understanding of cost causation.This shows
that the variability of our costs as a result of changes in the
volume of traffic over the network,is much higher than the
current access charges assume. We are discussing this issue
with industry stakeholders who share our concern that any
necessary increase in our marginal prices to reflect costs,
might affect anticipated growth (see also Section 1.5).
2. Better routes for freight
In publishing the route directory in CD-ROM fo rmat and on
the Internet (www. f r e i g h t . c o m m e r c i a l . c o. u k ) ,we completed
the fi rst stage of documenting the current chara c t e ristics of
the netwo rk . Since then, we have begun wo rk on assessing the
n e t wo rk ’s potential capability and have set out how we want
to improve it further in our freight route stra t e g y.We have
also introduced the ‘ F r e i g h t w ay ’c o n c e p t , a domestic ve rsion of
the Trans-European Freight Freeways promoted by the EU, t o
identify existing capacity on the netwo rk in anticipation of
m a rket demand.The fi rst phase of this wo rk highlighted 27
r e t u rn , long-distance paths on fi ve key freight routes with
d e p a rt u r e, a rrival and transit times that are competitive with
r o a d . EWS has since taken up two of these paths.
3. Service improvements – reduction in delays
Freight customers have also benefited from the
improvements in Railtrack’s service performance. In the
Ten-Point Plan, we set ourselves a target reduction of 5%.
Total-minutes delay in 1997/98 were reduced by 21% while
the number of trains increased by 5%.Delays per train fell to
less than five minutes on average.We expect these trends to
continue.We have not yet been able to provide specific
information about the performance of our freight-only lines
but expect to have fulfilled this customer requirement by
July 1999.