Daniel Griffiths, CEO of Intercity Rail Freight

With station-based green logistics hubs we could service our cities with trains not vans and make the nation’s stations the biggest community asset we have after our hospitals, argues Daniel Griffiths

Intercity Rail Freight is the UK’s only passenger rail freight operator. We use the spare capacity on passenger trains to move freight into city centres. Our job is to eliminate vans rather than arctics, and we can service city centres with zero emission or zero emission incremental solutions to bring freight into a city centre.

If you take the unused capacity on the passenger trains on the network, the pre-pandemic figures equate to the equivalent of 150,000 articulated lorries everyday – that’s the fresh air that moves up and down our railways every day.

If you look at the train operators – and GWR has been involved in this for many years – the way that train operators, station operators and Network Rail can work better would be to provide us and the communities we all serve with station based green-urban logistic hubs.

Those are serviced primarily by cycle couriers, cargo vans, cargo bikes and the weird and wonderful machines you see driving around London at the moment. There’s loads of them but not a single one of them is based at a train station.

But you could put a hub at a station, and invariably there’s lots of space, like car parks that don’t get used. If they are provided to the sector, it would enable huge amounts of freight – millions and millions and millions of consignments. Beyond those, rail could also work with the logistics companies we all buy from everyday, to have hubs at stations that everyone can or has to use to serve, for example, Manchester. Stop bringing vans in and use them. That’s a big shift that requires the transport sector to think collaboratively, which they don’t – they compete with one another.

So my answer is two fold – Network Rail and the facilities operators should provide green logistics hubs to the rail sector so that we can service our cities with trains, not vans. If we do that, we’ll once again make our train stations the biggest community asset we have, after our hospitals.