I’m surprised that
@HSTEd feels that freight has suffered from “contractual paralysis”. The sector has seen both entry and exit from the market, handled huge changes in the coal and other industries, massive changes in intermodal flows, innovation with new locomotives, wagons and operating practices, a lot of private investment both directly and in partnership with ROSCOs and terminal developers, etc..
Locomotive innovation seems to have consisted of buying several hundred Class 66 in the 1990s and early 2000s and then small handfuls of locomotives, none of which have been particularly successful, since then. That was, ultimately, nearly 25 years ago at this point. Since then much of the locomotive innovation seems to have been playing games of various types to maximise the number of EMD 2-stroke engines available and to subvert emissions regulations.
Of the classes of locomotive introduced for freight use since the Class 66, few seem to have been very succesful at all. Perhaps the most succesful, the Class 68, was of course procured by a state operator with a core business outside "regular" rail freight - DRS.
I am completely unclear what remaining problems ‘nationalisation’ would solve. (Please don’t mention “electric traction” until there is adequate power supply for the 25kV network, including 75% growth, of course.)
I really don't want to derail the thread into a discussion of "How HSTEd would reimagine freight operations", but there are several ways in which a freight operation fully integrated into the passenger one could be a big benefit.
Personally I'm not sure that the 75% growth target is really that relevant, given that (as far as I can tell) it was introduced by the Sunak government in an attempt to sure up it's eco-credentials, I don't think I've seen a proper government whitepaper or report suggesting where this growth will come from since then.
In any case, if we were to replace all the freight locomotives with Class 99-esque electrodiesels we'd likely improve the position of the industry as a whole, even without wholesale improvements to power supplies sufficient to allow for true electric traction. Areas where faster freight trains would release paths would then be easier to target with power supply improvements, and I imagine some areas probably would benefit right off the bath (GWML?).
Given that the Elizabeth line generated £670m in ticket revenue in 2024/25 whilst the entire freight sector only generated ~£1bn, I don't think its silly to suggest that doing almost anything that improves the ability of the Elizabeth line to use the GWML reliefs is likely to improve the industry's finances, even if it notionally increases the cost of operating the Mendips aggregates and other freight services (new locomotives, more rolling stock to run out of peak hours etc).
As another example, it's hard to get good a good estimate due to statistics gaps, but at the established fitting costs of Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes (a few thousand US dollars per vehicle), it wouldn't take long fo them to see real benefits on a systems basis. For example, the system would provide continuous surveillance of handbrake state, axle bearing temperatures and wheel rotation speed, eliminating incidents like the derailment of an oil train at Llangennech (caused by overheating axles) in 2020 as well as reducing the need for complex and expensive trackside hot axle box detectors. On intensively used routes, that the performance of such freight trains can get much closer to passenger operations is also likely to be a boon.
As it stands freight operators are provided paths with access charges far below what even passenger trains would pay (let alone their true cost!) and given their supply of very cheap railway diesel, are not incentivised to bear the cossts of switching to new locomotives and new braking equipment for which the benefits will accrue to others.
EDIT: Assuming an ECP brake installation included a vibration detector, it could also have limited the damage from that freight train derailment on the Gospel Oak to Barking line (also 2020!) where the train continued for ~2.5 miles after the derailment. They are in the palette of supported features but I do not believe the original FRA specification requires them. Vibration sensors are not expensive!
