European railfreight giant, DB Cargo, has recently launched two services from Valencia and Murcia to their intermodal terminal at Barking in East London. The services were put in place at short notice to transport fresh produce and medical products to the UK to maintain supplies of food and medicines during the covid-19 crisis. The new service uses the Channel Tunnel and HS1, taking 72-hours for the journey. Each train carries over a thousand tonnes of goods and removes carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to that produced by 30 HGVs.
A third service goes in the opposite direction and moves steel for Tata fom Port Talbot and Llanwern to customers for the manufacturing sectors of Luxemburg and Belgium.
This time wholly within the UK, a weekly service has been started up for CEMEX taking aggregates from quarries at Peak Forest, near Buxton, to their Birmingham facility. Trains of 22 box wagons will transport 1,684 tonnes of stone each time, loads which would require nearly 75 HGVs.
Finally a fifth service, also within UK, has been instituted departing from the new dedicated railfreight terminal at Cricklewood in North London. The terminal is already used by Tarmac and FCC Environmental and two other companies will move in shortly. Tarmac alone is served by trains of 1,500 tonnes of aggregates and gravel each. FCC Environmental processes 250,000 tonnes of waste (planned to rise to 500,000 tonnes) to recover useable building material. The new railfreight service will transport residual un-recyclable spoil to Calvert in Buckinghamshire to the north of Aylesbury, to fill in an old quarry.
The picture is from and and shows refrigerated containers from Spain in the Barking intermodal terminal.