2011 has been declared the International Year of Forests by the United Nations. The aim is to raise public awareness of the role that forests can play in securing a greener, more sustainable future. (more…)
The rail industry should aim to cut CO2 emissions in half by 2050, the chief executive of ATOC said at the ‘Sustainable Transport: ‘greening the transport sector’ conference in London last week.
The industry bills itself as the greenest form of public transport but in order to live up to this reputation a series of measures need to be implemented, Mr Roberts said. The railways are currently the largest single user of electricity in the UK taking up about 1% of the total demand. Roberts talked about making the industry more energy efficient and as an example highlighted the need to reduce the amount of electricity lost in transmission. (more…)
Despite the fact that local authorities are seeing unprecedented cuts to their budgets, few seem inclined to garner revenue from renewable energy.
Last summer, Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change secretary, urged councils to make better use of feed-in tariffs and sell renewable energy back to the national grid. This sounds as if it would produce a good source of income and yet only 275 local authorities have registered for the scheme so far. (more…)
London Waterloo was the busiest rail station in the year up to March 2010 with 86,397,666 users according to the latest station footfall tables from the Office of Rail Regulation. Although these figures are based on ticket sales, they try to estimate all people using entrances and exits rather than just people using trains. (more…)
The British public have resumed their love affair with rail travel if the latest figures from the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) are to be believed.
Last year, passengers made a total of 1.32 billion journeys, covering around 33.5 billion miles, on the National Rail network. That’s an increase in journeys of 6.9% on the year before and 37% on 2000. (more…)
Luckily, the rail industry escaped the worst of the government cuts and projects such as Crossrail and electrification, which had seemed to be in jeopardy, will now go ahead. In fact it looks as if there’ll be plenty of projects to keep skilled rail workers busy for at least the next ten years. (more…)
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