Earlier in December
Freightliner were making noises about what they thought would promote rail freight and thus decarbonisation - with no attempt to be objective, obviously. That is quite long, but this is the bit where they ask for some free money:
To make this a reality, Freightliner is calling on the government to support the rail freight industry in 3 key areas:
i) Halve track access charges that freight operators pay to run trains on the network.
ii) Double the modal shift grant that businesses can access to support using rail.
iii) Keep investing in the rail network to ensure that there is sufficient capacity on busy rail corridors to enable more freight trains to be timetabled.
I guess they knew the Government was about to produce such a policy statement, and
yesterday it appeared. That's the announcement, links lead to the
Rail freight growth target itself. This too is quite long, and has a lot about targets for others (various bits of the railway) to meet and much less about free money to enable it.
