This is Freight 21’s response and submission to the CA to help it determine its long-term strategy to improve transport in Cambridgeshire & Peterborough.

Freight 21 is particularly concerned to ensure Freight is considered as a significant part of the Transport mix. It has been studying the impact of Freight as part of the East West Rail infrastructure proposal and its impact on the area around Cambridge and its route. Having monitored and researched this for nearly 2 years, we would make the following comments regarding the impact of freight on the transport plans for Cambridge: –

1. The region lies on the direct line between Felixstowe (the largest container port in the UK handling around 50m tonnes p.a. based on today’s trade) and Bletchley /Milton Keynes (the main distribution centre of the UK and lying on the West Coast main railway line).
2. The East Coast through other ports such as Gt Yarmouth, Ipswich and Harwich is considered a gateway to Europe, and Cambridge lies at its epicentre.
3. The Oxford – Cambridge Arc is due to expand by around 25% pa and the population is forecast to almost double in 5 years.  In addition to passenger movements, the population expansion will require: –
   1. Materials for building the homes
   1. Materials for building the expansion of its commercial and research activities.
   1. The supply of incoming food, consumables, and services.

Rail infrastructure design will not only need to consider freight in the form of containers, but also heavy materials for construction, parcels, and mid-sized package deliveries to homes.

To handle this increased activity any plan will need to consider:-

1. Productivity – making it fast and efficient: –
2. capable of attracting passengers and freight over long distances but with minimum landscape intrusion.
3. competing with and replacing road traffic at all levels
4. capable of future upgrades such as automation.
5. Connectivity – the need to separate long distance and local services for most efficient travel times: –
6. enabling trunk main lines to carry passengers and freight over long distances at high speed
7. enabling consolidated freight to be broken down to smaller packages; to be delivered to city centres by local transport.
8. Climate – save CO2 by being energy efficient.
9. use freight criteria for gradients and curvature (energy efficiency).
10. shorten travel distances (saves costs of time and energy use).
11. Environment – improve capacity usage by making it efficient
12. Use the same rail services for freight and passengers
13. Move as much onto rail by efficiency demands.

•  
• Health & Safety – Keep the number and location of necessary high-speed movements to a minimum.
• Keep freight out of City Centre but close to commercial activities and research centres e.g. Trinity Science Park

 The answer we believe is to:-

1. Specify high speed trunk lines that allow fast trains on a central track to move past local stops.
2. Design local stops on side loops or a four-track system; optimising use of the infrastructure by allowing trains to move off the central line for local stops or to connect to local services e.g. to central Cambridge.
3. Given its 100-year lifetime, it is vital to make it as straight and level as possible – to reduce carbon footprint and minimise land use.
4. Design interchanges/hubs
   1. For passengers and parcel freight at Girton, Science Park or Waterbeach/Cambridge North
   1. For container Freight at Cambourne or St Neots (and possibly further East)
5. Make the inter-changes efficient and flexible – so for instance
   1. passengers could get to Kings Parade from the Girton Interchange.
   1. parcels or deliveries could get to Kings College or Grand Arcade via an underground link after normal hours – eventually an automated delivery from say Bletchley.
6. Make the interchange for mid freight at the science parks e.g. to the Trinity Science Park
7. Plan automation to increase driver efficiency and save driver fatigue

We believe that to lower the noise and visual impact of the main trunk line, it should be put in a trench.  This would enable bridges over the tracks to be built easily with little spatial intrusion. Such a system saves building embankments which are inherently unstable and take up what is precious land whether for amenity or agricultural use. By trenching, one can ensure that gradients are reasonable (or minimised) and suitable for heavier freight services – a factor that is less critical for passenger services.

We strongly support local light rail – typically running at surface level or in tunnels for local connections for distances up to say 5 miles. And these could connect in with a multi modal freight-passenger line. Hence we believe that we can use the optimum advantages of both local and main line rail systems; and so enable connections from the centre of Oxford to the centre of Cambridge (in less than 70 mins).

.   By enabling freight to travel from a main trunk line to an interconnect and then all the way to the city centre, we have a better chance than most at removing long haul and medium size freight trucks from the roads around Cambridge, thus in the process building a modern city fit for the 21^st Century.