Future of Rail Freight: Growth, Innovation and Delivery
Held in partnership with Network Rail and the Rail Freight Group
This paper summarises the ideas shared at Future of Rail Freight, on 8 July in York, drawing on workshops, panel discussions and keynote speaker contributions. We would like to thank all participants for their contributions which RIA will draw on in our future work programme. Further contributions to this topic are welcome, please contact RIA Senior Policy Executive Dominic Poole, at dominic.poole@riagb.org.uk
Key Takeaways
1. Freight remains a “hidden economy”: Freight is poorly understood by the public and government alike, and tends only to get attention when it stops working.
2. The Government freight growth target is achievable but not automatic: Hitting at least 75% freight growth by 2050 depends on reliability of access, terminal capacity and planning improving alongside it.
3. GBR needs a freight mandate from day one, not a retrofit: The growth target, GBR access and use policy, and cross-boundary planning all need to be built into GBR's design (from day 1, autumn 2027), with enough national oversight to stop devolution fragmenting freight services – a ‘guiding mind’ remains crucial.
4. Targeted, not blanket, electrification is the credible next step for freight traction: Using existing wires better, filling short gaps, and selectively electrifying a small number of strategic freight routes. Battery-only locomotives are not viable beyond shunting.
5. Planning is one of the industry's biggest constraints: Freight terminal capacity, aggregates supply for the housing sector, and strategic freight sites are all being lost to a planning system that still does not understand freight's economic importance.
6. The wider case for Rail Freight needs to be valued: Secondary and tertiary benefits (extra paths, reduced congestion, avoided emissions) need to be monetised, not assumed.
7. Deployment, not invention, is the technology bottleneck: Proven technology and fragmented but resilient funding both exist. Getting that technology into business-as-usual is where progress stalls.
Why Rail Freight Matters
Rail freight is a small share of the UK logistics market (around 8-10% of tonnage) but delivers outsized value: a contribution of roughly £2.5 billion to the UK economy each year, and around 76 HGV movements avoided for every freight train run – around 41,000 lorry journeys a day across the network. Rail freight moves around 30% of containers from the UK's major deep-sea ports, which depend on it to function. Despite this scale, freight's contribution remains largely invisible to the public and to government, and tends to only gain attention when it stops working.
The Growth Target, GBR and Devolution
Improved performance and reliability, alongside improved track access are the single biggest levers for growth through increased productivity and reduced costs. Freight built structurally into multi-year timetable planning, rather than fitted around passenger paths, paired with a formal mode-shift target, is the direction GBR needs to take. The existing track access discount policy has already generated over 20 additional freight flows, and demonstrates that improvements to journey times can unlock commercial benefits.
• GBR's design needs to reflect freight's cross-boundary, national character from the outset, with a clear access decision-making framework in place from GBR's first day. Freight access rights change at that point, and freight is otherwise vulnerable to ad hoc local decisions. The freight sector needs dependable disruption planning, and confidence that passenger growth won't come at the expense of existing traffic.
• On the Railways Bill: There are concerns regarding the Secretary of State’s powers to regulate private infrastructure, and a duty for GBR to prioritise its own operators' access needs ahead of others including freight, and the risk of capacity decisions disadvantaging freight under the new access and use policy.
Mayoral Strategic Authorities (MSAs) broadly support rail freight in principle, but each authority has their own priorities and funding cycles. This can lead to a real risk that freight, which generates few local votes, gets deprioritised against more visible local passenger commitments, and that localised decisions miss the bigger national picture. However, MSAs also bring huge opportunities for rail freight: larger strategic authorities can offer more meaningful engagement than a patchwork of local authorities, set transport strategy targets (for example towards modal shift or improved air quality) that structurally favours rail freight, and unlock new funding and private investment in freight sites. These opportunities depend on the role of GBR, ensuring that the organisation retains enough of a national vantage point to keep local authorities oriented to the wider network, and the symbiotic relationship is made visible at a local level.
Political change matters less than policy consistency: infrastructure decisions run on 10–30-year horizons and cannot be replanned around one or two-year cycles. International experience is a warning here: underinvestment in renewals elsewhere in Europe has already caused reliability problems and a reverse mode-shift back to road,
and rail growth is increasingly running into public “social licence” concerns over noise and vibration – something the UK has not yet faced at scale but may as rail freight volumes rise.
Targeted Electrification
RIA published three new reports on targeted electrification (a summary, an independent technical study, and RIA's own analysis). The core findings were that battery-only freight locomotives are not viable for freight beyond shunting activities, given constraints over battery power capability, and that whilst hybrid locomotives (battery/pantograph) can bridge short gaps, they are not a sufficient substitute for diesel vehicles. The reports recommended:
• Use existing electrified infrastructure more fully, through greater use of electric and bi-mode locomotives.
• Fill short gaps in the wires and address inadequate power supply at specific pinch points.
• Build freight properly into DfT's Rolling Stock and Infrastructure strategy: electrifying the final unwired third of trunk routes (RIA's “Plan of Thirds”) would bring around 95% of freight under the wires.
• Treat passenger electrification and battery-electric multiple unit schemes as freight opportunities too, where infilling can open a route to freight as a secondary benefit.
• A rolling programme of electrification can reduce delivery costs by a third.
The realistic path forward is small, well-evidenced schemes with a quantified benefitcost case rather than large capital programmes, since major funding is unlikely for the next decade For example, electrifying a roughly three-mile branch line into a major container port for around £10 million, unlocking an existing electric locomotive fleet and freeing paths elsewhere on the network.
On efficiency, a typical kettle (around 3kW) is roughly equivalent to the power needed to move three tonnes of aggregate at 60mph by rail, an efficiency road transport simply cannot match. Expanding freight on already-electrified routes will also need investment in traction power supply itself, not just additional wires.
Planning, Terminals and Freight Land
Strategic freight sites have been lost or delayed for decades through planning: one long-standing intermodal terminal site was first identified in 1992 and is still working through planning today. National planning guidance now references the need for intermodal facilities in key locations for the first time, but this has yet to translate into consistent practice The housing target adds a hidden dependency: around 40 million tonnes a year of additional aggregates will be needed within the next decade as local quarry sources deplete, much of which will need to move by rail (already around 50% of London's aggregates do). Sizewell C is a case study of the wrong outcome: local roadtraffic protests are a direct consequence of insufficient rail capacity secured at the planning stage.
3/5
Innovation and Deployment
Three case studies show freight innovation already working: lightweight wagon design increasing payload within existing gauge and axle limits; AI-based thermal and optical monitoring on a major biomass rail freight operation, cutting in-service faults by nearly 40%; and digital logistics tools combining train running and site order data to optimise scheduling on a major infrastructure programme.
Participants at the conference were asked to consider the opportunities and barriers that currently exist when innovating in the rail freight sector:
• Standards are an enabler, not a barrier. Outcome-based standards give industry room to innovate as long as requirements are met. Re-engineering the decades-old Freight Train Load Book allowed some freight trains to extend by up to 50% (20 to 30 wagons) once outdated 1950s assumptions were challenged. A derogation process exists where equipment doesn't meet a standard, rather than a hard block.
• Cost, not standards, is the real blocker. Wheel-slide protection has existed since the 1960s but still isn't standard fit on wagons, purely on cost passed through to leasing rates. The same logic killed UK adoption of Digital Automatic Coupling, at £35,000£40,000 per wagon with no clear return for the party bearing the cost. Faster benefit realisation on new investment, over a small number of years rather than decades, would help build the confidence needed to close this gap.
• Diverse funding pots can be a strength, not a weakness. Multiple funding pots (safety and standards research, infrastructure R&D and safety programmes, the Freight Innovation Fund) each serve a distinct purpose and give the industry multiple routes to get a good idea backed. The purpose of each funding pot should be clear, so that each is well-understood and well-used.
• Deployment is the bottleneck. Technology endorsed by both freight operators and the infrastructure manager can still take five years or more to reach a second mainline installation after first-of-a-kind funding. A formal process to filter, rank and push beneficial innovations into production is needed.
The Rail Technical Strategy now has a dedicated freight chapter (“Freight Friendly”), developed jointly across industry through a new Joint Freight RDI Board, giving the sector a single reference point for research priorities and co-funding decisions.
Market Access and Supply Chain Readiness
Rail freight is perceived as a comparatively closed and opaque market next to road haulage. Standards complexity and inconsistent client requirements make entry harder for new suppliers, and better data access would help new customers understand and plan freight use in the first place. GBR's policies towards rail freight growth are central to building that confidence. A recurring proposal is some form of independent body, clearing house, or “GBR freight enabler” that new customers could approach to navigate the market, though others argue that this will add extra cost.
The supply chain itself is largely ready for rail freight growth, but needs to remove its own barriers to entry rather than wait for external constraints to lift. The supply chain’s priorities are consistent with the themes above: sustained political and funding stability across electrification, gauge, planning and renewals; better-targeted public communication of both the benefits of rail freight and the cost of it failing; closer collaboration with sectors controlling key enablers such as planning, energy and land; and clearer joined-up visibility across the infrastructure and rolling stock pipelines, so that supply chain innovation is targeted at the sector's real pain points rather than spread thinly.
Conclusion
Rail freight has a credible, deliverable growth opportunity, and the barriers to it are largely known, not novel. Reliable structural access to freight paths, a freight-literate planning system, a small number of well-evidenced electrification schemes, and a funding, standards and market-access environment that gets proven innovation and new customers into the system faster are the practical levers. What is missing is less a lack of good ideas than consistent political and public visibility for a sector that tends only to be noticed when it stops.
RIA's new report on targeted electrification, alongside the existing rail freight growth target and forthcoming GBR design decisions, gives the sector a concrete near-term opportunity to press these points while the framework is still being shaped.