We may have invented them, but why don't we understand - and use properly - our railways?

With all this current furore about HS2 and rail capacity, economic benefits etc., I've been thinking. India can get a 'vehicle' to Mars for £45 million (of our aid money, just kidding) whereas it'll take us 200 times that to get a man to Birmingham 20 minutes more quickly than he can do the journey now, by 2030. I know that's spurious but it is kinda funny in the great scheme of things.

I am working on an HS2 blog specifically and will bother you with it shortly, but this is potentially a bigger issue in my opinion. Not as glamorous perhaps.

If I were to tell you of a scheme (I hate the word 'scheme' it has such negative Dickensian connotations but you know what I mean), that would transport goods much more efficiently around the country and would largely solve the problem of congestion and maintenance on our roads (for a while anyway since greater capacity leads to more journeys inexorably), and which wouldn't cost us (the government) a bean, would you be interested? Read on Macduff.

Have you ever seen a traffic jam on the railways? Apart from maybe queuing to get into a London station occasionally? Do you ever think: 'Christ, if I happened to find myself on one side of the track (quite possibly illegally but that's not my point), it'd take me hours to get to the other side because there's so many trains coming and going' ?

The reason I ask is that one of the main reasons being put forward by the government as to why HS2 is needed is capacity. Our rail lines are, it seems, clogged with trains - or if not with trains, then with commuters traveling at the same time every day, there and back, in order to earn a crust.

But if you travel at 09.30 or before or after the period between 4pm and 7pm, on a normal weekday, capacity is not an issue at all. And according to The Engineer magazine (which you may not have come across before but, trust me, is a credible and highly reliable bible for the engineering industry), there is no current capacity issue on the lines between London and Birmingham and beyond. More here. Whereas there are clearly capacity issues (mainly to do with the age of the rolling stock and there being no time to implement a proper solution), on Network South East. A blog, perhaps, for another day. But I'm talking about using our exisitng rail capacity here, not just for people.

Between 11pm and 6am there's almost nothing moving on the rails. Imagine that, the capacity to move millions of people in a short period of time every day, not being used for around one third of that day. Now of course the issue here is that people don't need to travel during those hours and that the rail operators have to gear up to meet peak demand. That's me blown out of the water then. But think on this:

Freight doesn't have to move during peak times. Perishable goods perhaps, but getting Spanish tomatoes from Dover to say Birmingham takes maybe eight hours in a truck, on the roads, at all hours of the day and night. Is it really beyond the wit of man to get them there in maybe four hours on a train, during the night when the rails are massively under-used? And for non-perishable goods the time-frame is much more forgiving.

But, given my utopian scenario, once a proper, intelligent system for transporting freight by rail, and at off peak hours of the day was in place, the delivery times would actually be much more reliable than for goods transported by road. And transporting frieght by night, on the railway which has massive capacity to do this, would get huge numbers of trucks off the roads during the day, thereby helping to solve the mega problem of traffic congestion at the same time.

One truck axle movement is the equivalent of 38,000 cars. By which I mean that one set of truck wheels does the equivalent damage to the road surface of 38,000 cars passing over the same bit of road. And most trucks have six axles. So getting one truck off the road is the equivalent, in highway maintenance terms of getting almost 240,000 cars off the roads in terms of damage.

And making this change would not require any major infrastructure investment: The rails are already there - you might need some additional rolling stock and a better computer system to control their movements on existing lines, but it's not like building a whole new railway system. And it would go a long way towards solving traffic congestion on our roads.

And all it would take (OK this is a bit simplistic and the devil is always in the detail I know), would be for the government to say 'we'll charge you an extra amount of money (punitive) to transport goods during the day (especially in peak traffic hours) and less - or nothing - if you transport the same goods at night (by road). And, (and here's the best bit) we'll give you a bonus if you get together with the rail freight companies and move your goods by rail at off-peak hours'. 

The infrastructure and capacity is already in place for this to be made to work, quite simply and effectively. Yes the rail option would require freight handling facilities around the country but they're already there - they're called 'B8' in planning terms - warehousing and distribution points. And yes there would obviously be the need to transport the goods between these distribution points and the point of sale, but that already happens anyway.

There wouldn't be more traffic locally than there is now and if implemented, most of these journeys would be made at night or at off peak times, in order to 'join up' with the schedule.

And this approach would get what? 50%, 60%, 80% of heavy goods vehicles off of our trunk roads almost overnight. And make much better use of our rail capacity.

It would also reduce the damage caused to our roads by more than half, overnight and, almost certainly, reduce the number of deaths on our roads significantly if there were fewer trucks on them. 

The world of transporting goods  designed for TEUs (twenty foot equivalent units or 'containers' to you and me). They're used to transport good around the world on container ships and then onward distribution 'in country' mostly by road. But they can also be transported by rail in a way which is much more efficient and would also be much more reliable in terms of the planned time of arrival (subject to getting the rail handling system right). But it's 2013, can we not develop a schedule which makes use of the massive unused capacity on our railways in order to deliver a better transport system and take a significant proportion of trucks off the roads, especially during peak times?

All it would take is a government directive and then the business opportunity such a system would afford to operators would almost certainly mean that the investment required in systems and freight terminals located to make use of the rail network instead of the road network, would come from the private sector. How many ProLogis warehouses does the government or the taxpayer pay for currently? None at all.

Even if there was some 'pump priming' needed from government, it would certainly not add up to even a small fraction of the £80 billion earmarked for HS2 and it would bring serious, measurable benefit to the whole country.

Joined-up thinking on transport? Now that would truly be a first.

Thanks for reading.