Blue Circle Consortium. (Blue Circle, Metalair Feldbinder, and Babcock Rail)
£2.9m was awarded to the consortium as one of the winners of the first SRA Innovative solutions competition in 2000.
This project involved the development of a “piggyback” concept for intermodal distribution of cement by rail and road. In addition to a special rail wagon, the Babcock Mega3, two trailer types were developed with the capability to be used on either road or conveyed by rail. The two types are a tank trailer and a bag trailer. The design also had to be able to carry the maximum payloads required for the customer and crucially to fit within the smallest common UK rail gauge profile to allow distribution by rail to any part of the network.
Challenging established design principles and technical constraints, development and the necessary railway approvals for the project were completed in 2002. A 2 year commercial trial will commence during 2003.
Driving the need for Blue Circle, now part of the LaFarge Group, was the operational savings they would be able to achieve by making direct deliveries to customers from a central cement plant and stripping out the need for storage silos in remote locations. It was identified that rising land values, especially in the South East, were increasingly impacting on the costs of distribution. This new intermodal solution, while more expensive in pure transport terms to some areas will reap overall financial and operational supply chain efficiencies for the group.