Collaboration in freight: paving the way for growth
From ensuring safety to driving sustainability, collaboration led by RSSB is helping freight.
To achieve the ambitious target of 75% growth in freight by 2050, collaboration is no longer a choice—it’s a necessity. The freight sector is strongly commercial, but everyone benefits if they collaborate to tackle and improve key issues. This is even more important given the ambitious growth target set by government. Our experts are working in four main areas to help achieve this target.
Safety is paramount in freight. Collaborative efforts for safety are already underway. For instance, you see a collaborative approach in the recognition of ‘common to all’ risks as one of the overarching themes for the Freight Safe Programme. This demonstrates that individual freight companies recognise the risks they share with others, despite commercial pressures.
However, to achieve results, this collaborative mindset, and collaborative actions, must be sustained. This is not easy when some collaboration tasks involve volunteering from busy jobs. It is particularly welcome that one of the ‘common to all’ topics is increasing participation in the many industry safety groups. Doing this will ensure that the voice of the freight sector is heard even more loudly and effectively in those groups. Other parts of rail may even recognise opportunities that were not noticed before. The net result will help improve the freight sector.
There are several important areas where we are involved in freight safety. We’re working with National Freight Safety Group (NFSG) to understand and reduce SPADs in freight. Analysis of freight SPADs by our experts shows that this issue mostly affects light locomotive movements when there isn’t a train being hauled. NFSG is working with the SPAD Risk Subgroup to understand the root causes of SPADs.
Overspeeding in freight is another important area that we’re working to understand with NFSG. And we also want to help reduce fatigue in freight. In 2020, our human factors experts worked with the freight sector and NFSG to produce a new Code of Practice. We continue to work with NFSG and the freight sector to help embed good fatigue management practice.
Underpinning all of this is good quality data, and being able to use it effectively. So we’ve also produced a new Freight Safety Data Hub. This makes it easier for people to explore freight safety data in ways that answer the questions they have, for issues that their business needs.
Find out more about the activities of the National Freight Safety Group.
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Collaborative research accelerates progress in freight. There are four key areas:
route access for heavier, longer, and larger freight trains
increasing average and maximum freight speeds
safe freight maintenance and operations
low carbon freight, which is part of our DECARB research programme.
Collaboration within RSSB, and between us and other stakeholders, helps prioritise the research projects that will help the sector the most. In addition to us, others recognise the importance of this issue too, and already fund freight research. These include Network Rail and the Freight Safe Improvement Programme.
Recently we’ve introduced regular meetings about the freight chapter of the Rail Technical Strategy. Here, research proposals for safety, performance, businesses issues, and freight growth are considered as a whole group, prioritised, and then allocated to funders. This collaborative approach means that vital research questions for freight are ranked, so resources are used most effectively. And once those research projects are underway, the collaboration within RSSB, and between RSSB and relevant industry experts, continues.
Find out about the Rail Technical Strategy.
There are 19 current standards workstreams about rolling stock that are related to freight. That’s a lot that RSSB’s standards experts are doing to help freight improve. As we all should know, standards don’t only make sure that everyone is doing the same thing. Their underlying rationale is to help save money, so they identify the commercial implications of any changes that are made.
Our standards are helping the whole sector improve. Our standards experts make sure all freight sector contributions help shape a particular workstream effectively. They use these contributions so that the needs and constraints of the freight sector are properly understood.
Standards also prevent individual firms from unnecessary attempts to ‘reinvent the wheel’—a strong risk in a fragmented commercial context. Rather than seeing standards as unhelpful but necessary, there’s a real opportunity for the freight sector to work together to realise commercial value through freight-related standards.
Find out more about the activities of the Rolling Stock Standards Committee.
The natural sustainability of rail for passenger journeys is well established, and government is keenly aware of these benefits. However, the impact of freight on the environment has taken a lower priority as other, more pressing, commercial needs have taken precedence.
This sounds discouraging. But the flip side of this is that there are many options for individual freight companies just starting out on sustainability. The potential for improvements in sustainability is compelling. This should be a no-brainer. Sustainability is an important driver underlying the 75% growth target. Customers making the model shift from road haulage to rail freight need to know that this improves their sustainability too. Without sustainability, an important part of their business case is lost.
We’ve worked with industry to produce tools for a sustainable railway. These can help freight too. Our resources include the Sustainability Maturity Assessment Tool, the Climate Change Adaptation Maturity Tool, and the Sustainable Rail Data framework. We provide e-learning to help too. Wherever you are on the path towards sustainability, we have resources to help.
Find out how our sustainability tools for rail can help freight.
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