On any given day, there are around seventy intermodal trains on the move in Great Britain. Rail companies, port operators and logistics companies have to battle arduous planning processes, but they are not giving up ambitious plans for new terminals, including some with automated handling equipment.
It wasn’t always like this. Back in 1959, the nationalised British Railways began running their “Conflat” service between London and Gushetfaulds, a converted goods yard in central Glasgow. These, smaller than TEU wagons soon gave way to ISO standard containers, and in 1965 British Railways rebranded the service with the name that has become synonymous: Freightliner.
Fast forward to the present day. Britain’s intermodal needs have grown considerably. Far from being adequately served by repurposed goods yards, they have spread to the four corners of the land. In Scotland, Gushetfaulds is no more. Instead, three modern terminals, all near Glasgow, have replaced it, and they all handle multiple train loads.
Scaling up
Coatbridge, with a storage capacity of over 2500 TEU, receives seven trains daily, all from English ports and inland hubs. Almost next door, and certainly within sight of the Coatbridge cranes, work continues on a much larger expansion of a neighbouring terminal.
Mossend International Railfreight Park is nothing if not ambitious. The owners (PD Stirling) claim they’ll be able to handle 500,000 containers annually. That’s enough to load every one of the anticipated capacity of sixteen daily trains. It’s certainly enough to keep the eight 775m sidings busy, and the planned two automated RMGs operating 24/7. All that however is dwarfed by the adjacent logistics park, which is proposed to provide over 200,000 square metres of warehouse and distribution space.
Encouraging modal shift
Modal shift to rail, encouraged by net-zero regulations, make these rail developments commercially attractive. They are also necessary to meet anticipated demand. Bill Reeve, the director of rail at the Scottish government’s Transport Scotland, told a conference of the industry’s Rail Freight Group, that much more intermodal rail traffic would be needed in future. He estimated that thirty or forty trains a day would be needed to cross the border between England and Scotland. Most of them would be on the West Coast Main Line, which is already the busiest mixed-traffic route in Europe.
It’s no accident that both Coatbridge and Mossend are within minutes of the Glasgow – London route. A short distance further north, Scotland’s busiest port, Grangemouth, has also strengthened its intermodal facilities. The port is now capable of handling 250,000 TEU annually, and the rail infrastructure has been modernised over the past few years too. The sidings have been lengthened to 775m, and sixteen straddle carriers are now on site.
Golden Triangle
This pattern of intermodal growth is repeated throughout the UK. Moving boxes accounts for more than a third of all rail freight net tonne-kilometres. Only construction material loads come close to the 1.4 billion tonne-kilometres of intermodal traffic each quarter.
Furthermore, all those intermodal services appear to be converging on an area roughly bounded by Birmingham, Nottingham and Northampton. Logistics operators call this the Golden Triangle. The distribution sweet spot is at the heart of Britain’s modern trade routes. It has also seen some of the most ambitious intermodal developments.
Ambition and scale are evident at SEGRO Logistics Park East Midlands Gateway. The development amounts to almost 300 hectares of warehousing, served by a railhead recently expanded to four operational 775m sidings. At 20 hectares, the designated Strategic Rail Freight Interchange is substantial in its own right. The hard standing, covering more than 37,000 square metres, has capacity for 20,000 TEU. It’s all ready for the reach stackers to deliver to the waiting trains, of which up to sixteen a day can be dispatched.
A must-have
Intermodal growth is leading demand for well connected, modern warehousing, and almost no logistics park is proposed without a rail terminal in its planning application. Much capital has been made by local opposition (there’s always local opposition in Britain) claiming that all these grandiose rail terminal plans are only there to get projects through the onerous British planning process. In high-profile cases, like Hinckley and Radlett (St Albans), primary opposition has been on the grounds that the rails will never be laid.
However, there is evidence to the contrary. Contractor Winvic is busy building another SEGRO development, this time in Northampton. Here, an expensive tunnel has been dug, specifically to provide a mainline rail connection for the 500,000 square metres of warehousing. Britain, it may be argued, is no longer a nation of shopkeepers nor factories, it is a nation of warehouses and logistics, supporting around half a million jobs.
At the ports
Many of those jobs are at ports, like Felixstowe. Britain’s busiest container terminal plays a huge role in dispatching intermodal traffic. As Felixstowe has expanded to cope with the biggest container vessels in the world, the shoreside infrastructure has felt the pressure. The A14 road, which runs due west from the port, has become a 135-mile (216km) conveyor belt of trucks, all the way to those distribution centres in the Golden Triangle.
The alternative, the single-track railway which loops around the dock complex, copes with around 35 intermodal trains every day. However, those trains then share the tracks with commuter and long-distance passenger traffic. Capacity is a perennial headache for the infrastructure agency Network Rail and for the freight train operators, all of whom are eager to run more of their 150 TEU consists out of Felixstowe.
Fit for purpose
Britain’s transport infrastructure problem is that rail serves industrial routes that were laid out in the nineteenth century. Reconfiguring these to match modern demand is proving expensive. Historically, in the days of the industrial empire, it was finished heavy engineering products, moved from factories in Glasgow or Manchester to waiting ships on the nearby quays on the Clyde or Manchester Ship Canal.
Today, it’s thousands of incoming boxes arriving at deep water ports like the purpose-built London Gateway and the Liverpool II. Boxes are not making “first-mile” from shop floor to shore. They’re moving long distances, to vast rail-served inland logistics hubs like Coatbridge in Scotland, iPort in Doncaster, or that ever-popular East Midlands Gateway in the heart of England.
To answer increasing demand, a portfolio of commercially led terminal developments is underway, all over Britain. On the south coast, for example, the Port of Southampton is undergoing a significant intermodal upgrade. Once the project is complete, deep sea shipping will have access to a 7.3 hectare facility that will link the existing intermodal rail terminal with container handling, storage, maintenance and repair, all within a single-site boundary for the first time at the port.
Port management company Solent Stevedores say the improved rail provision will enable the port to dispatch 180,000 containers per annum, reducing the number of trucks on the roads and improving air quality. “This project is a key part of the future of rail freight movement at the Port of Southampton”, said Clive Thomas, Commercial Director at Solent Stevedores. “Crucially, it goes a long way to support the Government’s target to reach Net Zero by 2050.”
In the east, the owners of London Gateway, DP World, have begun a multi-million-pound investment in new rail and intermodal infrastructure. DP World says the £12m programme will help answer imminently growing demand, and lift rail capacity at London Gateway by 50%.
“We are making investment in our rail capability and capacity with two new RMG cranes which will arrive in the same year that we open a new fourth berth”, said Andrew Bowen, Port Operations Director at London Gateway. “After the disruption of recent years, shipping lines and cargo owners are looking for capacity, reliability and growth opportunities.”
Cranes and reachstackers
Enthusiasm for rail-borne intermodal is evident, albeit on a smaller scale, in the hills of Scotland. In the picturesque village of Blackford in rural Stirlingshire, a modest terminal dispatches three weekly container trains of Highland Spring mineral water. Rail has usurped 40% of all the company’s road deliveries. Despite that reduction, not everyone is pleased. There was ire from residents who didn’t appreciate the ascetics of the terminal’s one RTG, even if it is electrically powered.
Highland spring is being progressive with an eRTG for a low-volume operation, but elsewhere the reach stacker is providing a more cost-effective handling option for short-haul intermodal. A prime example is the recent resurrection of the short, 50km run between Grangemouth and Linwood near Glasgow. The demonstration, arranged by Malcolm Group logistics, gathered the attention of Scotland’s cabinet secretary for transport, Fiona Hyslop.
There was no such ministerial send off for DP World’s recently established intermodal transfer service between its hubs at London Gateway and Southampton. However, the logistics industry enthusiasm for rail is apparent on the ground. The infrastructure management agency, Network Rail, has been steadily working away on strategies that help redesign the network to better cope with modern freight demands, primarily intermodal traffic.
Network Rail has been developing a freight spine, that connects Southampton with the Midlands. That route avoids long detours around London, but it was not easily achieved. Railway lines that go cross-county, and don’t point towards London, tend to be the network’s rural byways that are a challenge for intermodal rail.
Victorian era low bridges and tunnels, tight curves and short sidings are among the issues that must be addressed. Fitting in with other services, mainly passengers, is never easily achieved.
Much of that infrastructural inconvenience may be overcome by adopting a “port to hub by train, then last mile by road” delivery model. However, expensive decisions still need to be made, particularly on rail infrastructure. We will not see the likes of Gushetfaulds again, but we’ll certainly see more and more container trains if the true potential of “intermodal Britain” is realised.
Meeting the challenge: East Midlands Gateway
Maritime, who manage operations at East Midlands Gateway (EMG), see the facility becoming an inland hub, connecting the majority of the main UK ports and the most strategic areas of the country, primarily: Scotland, North East, North West, South East, and South Wales. Serving this hub, Maritime plans to transport EU, rest of the world, and domestic product on mixed trains.
“It is important to note the size of the addressable markets”, says John Bailey, Managing Director – Intermodal at Maritime Transport. “Rest of the world containers account for a fraction of the total transport moves in the UK, yet account for the vast majority of intermodal rail freight. There are circa 70 intermodal services running at any given time and only 12 of these are what we would deem as truly domestic, and seven of those are for a leading multinational retailer.
“This is why with the terminal network we are building, our actual opportunity is conversion of road FTL [Full Truck Load] moves to rail, like our domestic distribution train with CCEP [Coca-Cola] which we launched in 2022. The proximity of the new terminal to a customer base on the large commercial estates means minimum costs for first and final miles and makes rail competitive with road.”
John Bailey addresses the choice of handling equipment, and it comes down to the two factors that most matter in the logistics industry. “On the reach stacker vs crane question, it is simple economics,” he explains. “Cranes are expensive and nowhere near as flexible as a reach stacker. The latter, whilst becoming more expensive from a capex angle, are becoming cheaper to run as fuel consumption improves and hybrid/fully electric models come to market.
“The real game changer would be automation of them, which you can already get in cranes. There are multiple companies working on this. A rough estimate comparing current costs suggest you need more than nine trains per day to justify a crane investment. If automation of reach stackers is achieved, this will push the number even higher, potentially to more than twelve. Apart from the ports, no one terminal handles that many trains currently.”
This article was originally published by our sister publication WorldCargoNews.com