Coal is king for award winning Freightliner
 

Coal is king for award winning Freightliner
Posted: 19th March 2008 | From Railnews Mar 2008 print edition


Freightliner Heavy Haul (FHH) has won a major award for its work in moving huge quantities of coal from ports to power stations last year.

The company took delivery of the Logistics Provider of the Year Award at the Annual Coal UK Awards dinner on Wednesday 6 February.

The award is presented to the company that has served the coal and power industries to the highest degree during the year.

FHH was chosen over other UK rail freight operators, port companies and shipping agents.

Nominations were received from across the industry, with judges selecting FHH because of its “excellent service and reliability”.

Martin Wilks, coal director and deputy managing director, Freightliner Heavy Haul Ltd, said: “We are delighted to be the recipients of this accolade, achieving recognition from the coal industry.

“This reflects the dedication and hard work of the whole FHH team”

I understand LocoJoe your accolade of Freightliner in their efforts in moving this important fuel. Yet I'm dismayed that the coal coal is not British.
I'm still angry about it to this day. What a damn waste!

most people would prefer it if it was British coal but my posting was really about the movment of coal rather than who had mined it.

Good, An efficient operation that's beaten the road hauliers and taken 10,000 heavy lorries off our roads.

They are certainly very efficient at taking work off other rail companies, or at least they were. Now the boots on the other foot in a lot of places because GBRf are taking work off them. EWS are also recovering some work that they lost to them, and I believe that heavy Haul wouldn't have been half as successful if they hadn't relied on EWS doing the majority of the groundwork in locations so their trains could run there. and also the fact that EWS groundstaff assist with them preparing their trains.

Agree with you there Dynamo. There must be a big opportunity for Intermodal into the West of England but Freightliner have never taken it up - if they just steal the profits and loads from the more enterprising companies railfreight will never expand its current footprint Very much enjoyed the Thornaby trip video post BTW. Can you do another?

I'm not really sure why you are condemning Freightliner for this.:confused: If, as you say, this opportunity does exist then why haven't ANY of the freight companies taken it up?
Freightliner don't have a monopoly on intermodal traffic.

EWS do (or did) have an Enterprise network which extended the reach and footprint of railfreight and gave at least some notion of an entry level railfreight operation. Freightliner are firmly in the full-trainload only camp. You can forgive DRS and GBRf to an extent because of their small size but Freighliner are the most profitable rail company yet the most risk-averse. (Some might say these two factors are mutually correlated). They are also the biggest intermodal haulier by a country mile with an established network of terminals. I'm not condemning them but I stand by my criticism of them

Lets put all rail freight under government control.Open up more UK open cast coal sites.

There's a story doing the rounds, which has been verified to me by a driver of Freightliner Heavy Haul, that there was a big meeting at Drax Power Station recently. The bosses at Drax had managers from EWS, GBRF and FHH in to ask them a few questions.

Firstly they said to EWS "you had X amount of trains late arriving at Drax power station. Can you give the details why?" So EWS managers gave a detailed account of why each and every train was late. Some were due to EWS's own failures, some were due to Network Rail signal or track failures, and some were due to vandalism etc.

Drax then asked GBRF the same question, and GBRF managers came back with their own detailed analysis in the same way that EWS had.

Drax then asked FHH for their reasons why X amount of their trains were late. FHH answered that they couldn't actually give any reasons why any of their trains were late.

Drax managers then told the EWS and GBRF reps to leave the room. They then told FHH that they were very unhappy with their response and that they are issuing them with a final warning. If the same thing happens again, FHH will not be allowed to deliver coal to Drax anymore.