West Highland line to see Rio Tinto Alcan freight move to rail

In a positive move to haul freight by rail and not road, Rio Tinto Alcan and freight operator First GBRf announced recently an agreement that alumina would be hauled to the smelter at Fort William where it would be transformed into aluminium ingots for daily rail transport back to HQ at Lynemouth in Northumberland.

This will be the first time First GBRf will have run a regular Anglo-Scottish train.

In mid February, First GBRf ‘s  66728 Institute of Railway Operators locomotive hauled two Class 325s to Fort William for driver training (shunting) - the first time an electric train, even though under tow, had gone north of Helensburh on the Clyde.

The two Class 325s are normally used on the Royal Mail service between Glasgow and London.

This rail haulage operation was a highly unusual one. It was recorded, is published on You Tube and is here to watch below.

Rio Tinto Alcan is doing this from a conscious effort to reduce its environmental impact by cutting the number of trucks it sends to and from the Highlands.

This is particularly important for an industry operator proving for its own huge power needs by running coal-fired power station.

It was the nearby presence of two still-open coal mines at Ellington and Lynemouth and the proximity of the deep sea port of Blyth, all in Northumberland, that drove the decision to locate the Rio Tinto Alcan works at Lynemouth.

It takes the amount of electricity one family would consume in 20 years to smelt a single tonne of aluminium - and so Rio Tinto Alcan themselves commissioned the building of a power station at Lynemouth. This was fed by coal from the local mines and its 420 MW capacity fuels the plant with a surplus sold to the National Grid.

These days coal is imported and indeed the recent agreement with First GBRf includes a deal to haul coal by rail from the docks at Blyth, Port of Tyne and Steadsburn to Lynemouth.

The contract between the aluminium producer and the rail freight company was due to start at the end of February but the snow and the consequent avalanches falling from Beinn Odhar and blocking the West Highland Line below, have been a delaying factor.

Our immediate source for this information, Bob Wakeham, says wryly: ‘I hope the Fort William smelter has enough alumina to tide them over until the trains can run again….but that’s another story’.