Animation – Britain’s Steel Spine

Rail freight contributes almost £2.5bn to our economy and plays a big part in reducing congestion and carbon emissions.

We’re improving the network so it can carry more freight traffic and make rail freight more competitive with other modes or transport by increasing its efficiency.

We can invest more into your journeys by being more efficient and we’re delivering £4bn of efficiencies by pursuing better value.

We’ve challenged ourselves to reduce our costs by 15% when building major projects; we’re looking at better planning, deals and designs so we can deliver our plans for less money.

Innovation is a vital part of our efforts to give you safe and reliable services without the need to increase spending.

We’re investing £245m to improve technology and explore new ideas, products and services to benefit you and freight users, aiming to return about £3 for every £1 spent.

We spend about £7bn on works, services or products, each year, and we’re aiming to do more business with small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

We’ve more than doubled our investments with SMEs in the past several years, driving this critical part of the economy; all while doing our best to make it easier for third parties to work with us.

It’s never been more important for the railway to play its part in Britain’s economic future.

We’ll do our part to help Britain build back better by being driven, efficient and collaborative with our partners across the rail industry and beyond.