Rail’s trunk routes are vital for transporting freight

Paul Withrington calculates that freight moved per track km of rail is only about one-third of that moved per lane km on our trunk roads (Letters LTT 07 Dec 12). He arrives at this conclusion by wrongly assuming that all rail routes are used to carry freight whilst at the same time ignoring the fact that almost all road freight using the strategic road network has to use the rest of the road network in order to gain access to and from motorways and trunk roads.

It follows that a calculation of traffic moved on the trunk road network can only be compared with rail if the rail equivalent of a trunk road, such as the West Coast Main Line, is considered. This has a total route length of about 1,000km and carries an average of 85 freight trains in each direction every day.

Many of these trains, such as those carrying coal, steel or aggregates, could be carrying the equivalent of 50 to 60 lorry loads while container trains could be carrying the equivalent of 40 or more articulated lorries. If the average payload is, say 1,000 tonnes, the average daily flow per track (only one track in each direction is available for freight on the West Coast Main Line) works out at about 85,000 tonnes.

This is at least 50 times greater than Paul’s ridiculous calculation for freight on rail and some 16 times greater than his figure for motorway lanes.

Far from being in decline, rail freight increased last year in spite of the recession and now runs at more than 20bn tonne km a year. Rail freight now has around 11.5% of the road/rail freight market in Britain and given that, taken as a whole, the total route mileage of all rail routes in Britain is only about 4% of our surface transport infrastructure while roads account for nearly 96%, it follows that rail must move more freight (and passengers) per route km than our roads do.       

Discuss this at LTT's UK Rail & Freight Conference