Highway authorities with heavy lorry flows could signficantly cut their road maintenance bills by diverting freight to rail, according to a study for a campaign group.

The research, commissioned by Freight on Rail, focused on a county with quarries served by rail. Transport consultancy, MTRU, estimated that had the same cargoes been transported by road, the local network would have required more than £770,000 a year in additional maintenance.

HGVs would make 268,000 trips, travelling almost 10M miles on the county’s roads. With a total highways budget of around £15M in 2004/05, the unnamed English authority was a typical county, and others could reap similar benefits, the group argued. But its suggestion that funds could be profitably diverted from road repairs is unlikely to find favour at a time when councils are under fire for not spending enough on maintenance.

‘This research suggests that certain local authorities, with signficant bulk, waste or port traffic, for example, should be free to use their road maintenance budget to support rail freight facilities and services,’ said Philippa Edmunds, Freight on Rail campaigner. MTRU used commercially-sensitive information on the flows of rail freight from quarries, and worked out alternative road distances to the boundary for trucks with a 25t payload. The ‘4th power law’, which states that one 10t axle is 160,000 times more damaging to a road surface than a 0.5t car axle, was used to calculate the maintenance cost.

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