More people are choosing train over plane when travelling between Scotland’s Central Belt and London than at any time in more than 20 years.
That historic shift in travel patterns, with rail now making up around a third of the market, follows particularly strong growth over the last year on Virgin Trains’ two Anglo-Scottish rail routes and represents an important step forward in improving Scotland’s connectivity.
Its consequences for the environment are spelled out in a recent report, A Green Journey to Growth, by sustainable transport charity Transform Scotland. The key conclusion is that while there has been steady growth in the overall air and rail market between Glasgow/Edinburgh and London over the last decade, the potential for increasing CO2 levels has been offset and at times reduced by the shift from air to rail, which is around five times greener than air on a per-passenger-journey basis.
This is a remarkable – and remarkably positive – finding. Reducing carbon emissions and generating economic growth can make unhappy policy bedfellows, particularly in the case of transport, where CO2 levels have barely dropped since 1990. So it’s worth reflecting on strategies which are working to drive the agenda of sustainable transport growth and asking what we can do to encourage them.
Investment in improving the frequency, speed and quality of rail journeys has clearly driven a big increase in passenger numbers. On Virgin Trains’ west coast route between Glasgow and London, we saw the number of journeys increase threefold between 2009 and 2015 to more than 600,000 per year. This followed the introduction of the tilting Pendolino fleet, accelerated journey times and a regular hourly timetable. The six-week closure of the route due to problems with the Lamington viaduct in 2016 dented passenger numbers but this proved temporary, with growth subsequently returning to its previous strong trend.
On the east coast route where I work, we are well into an eight-year journey to replicate that transformation in the quality of services. Last year we added 25 direct services between Edinburgh and London per week, completely overhauled our train interiors and, along with west coast, doubled the industry-standard booking horizon of three months and introduced our revolutionary onboard entertainment streaming service, BEAM as part of a £140m investment programme. That helped drive an 8% growth in passenger numbers last year, with more than 1m people travelling between Edinburgh and London for the first time.
As a result, Virgin Trains’ market share against airlines in June was as high as 37% between Edinburgh and London, up two percentage points on its previous peak in 2014. On west coast, Virgin Trains’ market share between Glasgow and London was 27%. This is a big shift from 2015, when rail’s total market share between Glasgow/Edinburgh and London a decade ago was only 20%.
The level of carbon savings generated by this shift bear some reflection. Between 2005 and 2015, 332,208tCO2 were saved as a result of people choosing train over plane. That’s enough to take 145,000 cars off the road for a year or drive around the world 44,000 times.
The scale of the CO2 saving offered by rail is also apparent when looking at some of the other choices individuals and businesses can make to reduce CO2. For instance, a leisure traveller who makes around eight journeys between the Central Belt and London a year would save nearly half the level of CO2 generated by a typical household in a year if four of those journeys were made by train rather than plane, according to Transform Scotland. For an SME, shifting from 10% to 20% of journeys made by train instead of plane would cut the equivalent CO2 to powering two houses for a year. For a Corporation, a similar shift could power 439 houses.
Looking forward, Transform Scotland predict this trend for increased travel but lowering emissions to be even stronger on the east coast route, thanks to the introduction of our state-of-the-art Azuma fleet from December next year. These will give us 28% more seats out of King’s Cross at peak times and allow us to accelerate London-Edinburgh journeys to four hours at the end of the decade. The first of these test trains debuted in Scotland in August, generating a huge level of interest as it crossed the Royal Border Bridge at Berwick for the first time.
We have been clear in our ambitions to win 50% of the market share between Edinburgh and London by the end of our east coast franchise in 2023. This would see rail achieve equal billing on what is now the busiest domestic air route, following the almost complete reversal of air’s dominance between Manchester and London a decade earlier.
As the Transform Scotland report concludes, smart decisions by government, businesses and individuals are needed to nurture this positive trajectory and deliver the elusive combination of reducing CO2 whilst also driving economic growth. Rail has a strong role to play and we’re immensely proud of the contribution we’re making to this agenda.
See: http://transformscotland.org.uk/a-green-journey-to-growth/
