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FREIGHTLINER Transferring road freight to the railways might be a
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relatively new development for road hauliers, but for rail-freight operators the use of road haulage has a much longer pedigree In few companies is this more apparent than Freightliner, a rail-freight specialist that also runs a road fleet of more than 200 trailers and 100 tractor units.
Keith Gray, Freightliner's business planning director, estimates that a quarter of all the freight transported by Freightliner makes the final leg of its journey on a Freightliner truck, much of the rest is taken by other hauliers or customers' own vehicles.
He says: "The customer decides, but many like a one-stop shop. The advantage to us in running our own fleet is that we're able to control what happens from collection to delivery, so ifs the best way to ensure that we keep customers happy."
Freightliner is also at the forefront of the campaign to make the UK's rail network adapt quickly to the higher 9ft ein containers which are becoming the global standard. Gray says the company has been lobbying Network Rail, the successor to Railtrack, to make the necessary changes to the rail gauge. He adds: "It is not so much a case of this being necessary in order to increase rail's share of the freight market; it is that without it the market will decrease because all newbuild containers are 9ff Gin."