22
FREIGHT
Mark Wyborn, Head of Freight and Route Services at Porterbrook, was tasked with developing the company’s first dedicated freight strategy when he joined three-and-a-half year ago. He discusses the progress made
T
Investing in first class rail freight
hings have changed at Porterbrook in regards to rail freight since 2021. It was three and a half years ago that the rolling stock owner and asset manager appointed Mark Wyborn, giving him the responsibility for developing its first dedicated freight strategy. “One of the things rolling stock leasing companies have been criticised for in recent times is around how much of a hands-off approach they’ve taken with their assets,” he said. “As we have grown the number of assets we have on lease we have been determined to be more hands-on now, working together with the industry in partnership to achieve industry growth for rail freight. “We’ve got more wagons, we are stepping into the shunt locomotive space, we’re looking at express freight, we’re doing far more infrastructure monitoring for Network Rail, and we’re looking to expand our locomotive fleet. We stand behind rail freight as the most carbon-friendly way to move goods and we make sure that plays through everything we do, with decarbonisation a key driver behind all of this.” Porterbrook has been at the heart of the UK rail network for three decades and owns around a quarter of the national passenger rail fleet. Its impact in the rail freight space is gathering momentum, particularly next month when a trial is due to get underway which will see four Class 769s being used for express freight by two different operators. They are currently being converted at Wabtec in Doncaster, and Porterbrook is subsidising the conversion, with the first due to be delivered in November and the second by the end of the year. The final two will be delivered in the first quarter of next year. “Porterbrook is subsidising this on the backdrop of the fact we want to accelerate rail freight growth and to see if there is a market that can be commercially tested because when we look at rail versus road it is always that pinch point around whether it stacks up when you start converting the trains,” said Mark who added the trial will last six months. “Porterbrook is subsidising the trial, as we want to accelerate rail freight growth. As part of this strategy, we want to commercially test rail vs road and benchmark this with reliability. If both factors align, we have a model that can push the rail freight growth agenda. Then the idea is that there will be a three-way partnership between the operator, the logistics provider and Porterbrook, and if we need it,
JNA-X box wagon
we will bring the maintainer into that mix. “We’re focusing on reliability, and we will be actively undertaking commissioning and testing of our mileage accumulation and that is going to be a large part of the trial. The unit will only go to the end customer at the point we all feel is right.” Another approach being looked at is bringing the Great British Railways Transition Team (GBRTT) into the mix, particularly following the Government’s rail freight growth target of 75 per cent by 2050 – a figure set in part after GBRTT’s call for evidence on rail freight growth. In a bid to drive rail freight growth, authorised grants on variable track access have been announced for those competing with road and/or who are new to rail. “We are actively pushing that agenda to see how that test stands to start a service and what that will look like going forward,” Mark added. “This can’t be done alone, what we are doing is a joint collaborative effort in order to really push that growth agenda,
October 2024
because otherwise we are all just going off in our different directions. We can bring all of this together and really push all of those different levers and really go for that growth and make sure it makes commercial sense as well, as a partnership approach is the only way to achieve this “A key part of express freight is that it operates in a passenger timetable because the train was a passenger train. Our current ambition is to target the Midlands belt up to Scotland first and then the Midlands into London; although we are open to working on the specific requirements of the logistic providers network, it has to be an easy transition. We have 30 Class 769s that we can deploy, and it would be great if we could deploy them all, but we know it’s going to be a step-by-step approach because Express Freight is new to rail and is going to be completely reliant on how we can all deliver this from a reliability point of view and ultimately competitively from a commercial point of view.