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Sunday Independent
November 18th 2001
by Jerrome O'Reilly
Ignoring best practice, Irish Rail has to cut freight service by half, says
Jerome Reilly
The Government's lunacy in effectively forcing Irish Rail to slash its freight service by nearly 50 per cent is illustrated by a single tragic statistic: of 20 cyclists killed in Dublin in the last six years, 15 died as a result of collisions with juggernauts.
Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) suffocate our cities with traffic congestion and pollution, and shatter the peace of towns and villages as they hurtle along some of the worst roads in Ireland.
The combination of bad roads and and an ever increasing number of juggernauts travelling on them makes more accidents and increased emissions of carcinogenic C02 inevitable.
Why, then, does the Government want to bring yet more heavy lorries on the roads by forcing Irish Rail to halve its freight service?
Already, the removing of one service since October 31 moving timber for Coillte by rail will bring an extra 20,000 heavy lorry journeys per year, each of 90 miles duration.
The plan to slash 46 per cent of freight services will mean tens of thousands of extra journeys by lorries each year.
Irish Rail is butchering its rail freight business at the same time that it's spending millions upgrading its passenger services, stations, rolling stock and facilities.
Freight services on Irish railways are losing buckets of cash an estimated £6.6 million this year. Ireland, almost alone among EU nations, offers no state subventions to encourage the moving of heavy freight by rail rather than road.
Irish Rail spokesman Barry Kenny said: "We are trying to get to the stage where instead of losing nearly £6.7m a year on our freight service we will have a surplus of some £5m by 2006. That is the target.
"Freight doesn't get a subvention from Government, although Iarnrod Eireann does receive Government funds of about £120m each year to cover passenger services and infrastructure. However, freight operates in a commercial open environment, in direct competition with the road hauliers.
"We don't have certain benefits that other European railways have in terms of long distances to travel and other economies of scale, and we also usually have road transfers at either end of the rail journey. If you are a customer in West Cork and are trying to deliver to Tallaght you have to arrange road transport from West Cork to Cork station, then come up to North Wall by rail freight and then out to Tallaght by road. Both in terms of time and cost it's quite a burden," he said.
Kenny insists that in some areas of the freight business, rail is still king.
"Where we compete well is where we have full train loads and point-to-point deliveries. We have a number of profitable freight businesses that we do well on, but we also have a number that are simply unviable.
"While no final decision has been made by the board of Iarnrod Eireann there is a proposal on the table to reduce freight capacity by 46 per cent from the current total, equivalent to 510 million tonnes of goods, each tonne travelling a kilometre.~
The aim to is withdraw from unprofitable businesses and stay with those that are making money.
What the board has done is to tell senior management to bargain with the Department of Public Enterprise to see if it is possible to secure funding for unprofitable freight business either Exchequer funds or EU grants.
"If that is not forthcoming, then the planned reductions will go ahead, which would free up personnel, locomotives and investment funds for the use of passenger services which, after all, is our core business," Barry Kenny says.
He added: " We have a major investment programme continuing on the rail network. If we were to stay in freight as it exists today you are talking about an investment requirement of £100m in terms of wagons, railheads and other infrastructural needs in the medium term to stay in a business that is going to, without subvention, lose money every single year." It is obvious that Irish Rail is not confident that a tranche of state or EU funds will be injected into the freight business, especially as the state itself is abandoning rail in favour of road, forcing Iarnrod Eireann already to drop one loss-making element of the business.
In 1999, some 180,000 tonnes of timber from the state forestry agency Coillte were transported by rail, much of it from plantations in some of the most isolated areas of the country where the roads are inevitably poor.
By last year that had dropped by more than half, to 75,000 tonnes, with much of the freight now going by road. Instead of 15 trains a week the business declined to four full loads per week.
Because they were being paid by the tonne the dramatic fall-off in business meant that what had once been a profitable enterprise for Irish Rail began to lose money. The company went to Coillte and sought guaranteed volumes and tonnage. Coillte declined and since October 31 last the business has ceased.
While Irish Rail meets the commercial criteria laid down by the Department of Public Enterprise, the cost to the nation is high in terms of increased air pollution through CO2 emissions from lorries that will now take up the slack.
There will be increased traffic congestion and inevitably more accidents as an extra 1.25 million tonnes of goods travel the road network every year, mostly products like cement and fertiliser and single loads of goods which are now cheaper to move by road.
Of 20 cyclists killed in Dublin in recent years, 15 were in collision with heavy lorries.
The Dublin Cycling Campaign (DCC) believes Government policy is deeply flawed.
Chairman David Maher told the Sunday Independent: "The decision to greatly reduce the amount of freight carried on the railways reflects lack of leadership while right across Europe governments are using a combination of taxes and subsidies to encourage more freight off the roads and on to rail."
Mr Maher said that in Switzerland there is now serious consideration being given to forcing all transnational freight to be carried by rail.
"No doubt this increase in road freight will be used to justify an NRA road-building craze. If the same level of Government subsidy was given to the CIE freight division as is being given to build roads then the routes currently facing closures would be profitable.
"It reflects on the Government's indifference to the environmental effects of its transport policy and [to the fact] that HGVs cause a massively disproportionate number of road deaths 75 per cent of cycle fatalities in Dublin in the last six years. This Government policy will simply add to this dreadful statistic. Obviously road deaths are of little importance. What price does the Government put on an extra dead cyclist?"
He added that in terms of road safety the Government has not yet been able to meet key objectives.
"There is no random drinking testing, no penalty point system indeed we have just 20 speed cameras in the Republic. In the UK there are 4,500 speed cameras and they have been extremely effective in reducing road deaths."
"Last year, a National Roads Authority survey found that on urban national roads a staggering 94 per cent of cars and 89 per cent of HGVs exceed the 30 mph limit," David Maher added.
The Labour Party spokesman on Public Enterprise, Emmet Stagg, says that a Government decision to allow Irish Rail to halve its freight business would be a social and environmental disaster.
"The direct consequence of such a decision would be a huge transfer of freight from the rail system on to already overcrowded and, in many cases, dangerous roads. It would mean additional road deaths and a huge number of extra juggernauts trundling through the towns and villages of Ireland," he said.
"I find it extraordinary that this should even be considered at a time when there has been general acceptance of the need to reduce the number of heavy vehicles using our roads." The move also runs contrary to European Union policy. An EU White Paper published just weeks ago stressed the need to transfer more freight into environmentally-friendly forms of transport. Rail transport is probably the most environmentally-sound form of transport available.
"Abandoning a major part of its rail freight business may save Irish Rail some money, but what will be the financial cost in terms of damage to roads, buildings and the environment, not to mention the cost in terms of human lives and injuries?" Emmet Stagg asked.
Last week the utter confusion of Government transport policy was exposed at the Dáil Committee on Public Accounts.
The all-party committee was told of the recent deaths of two young cyclists involved in collisions with HGV lorries in Dublin and the inevitability of more accidents because of increased numbers of heavy lorries in towns and cities. The committee was also told that average journey times in Dublin are now working out at 50 minutes to travel five kilometres.
Niall Callan, Secretary General at the Department of the Environment told the Comptroller and Auditor General, John Purcell, that more cities were struggling with the problem of congestion.
Meanwhile, the directive from the Department of Public Enterprise that Irish Rail must pay its way looks like ensuring there will be more lorries on the roads, more pollution and more fatal accidents.
Copyright © Sunday Independent 2001
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