News from the East Anglian Branch of Railfuture, Edited by Martin Thorne and Jerry Alderson.
Railfuture News Snippets 354 - 30/09/2022
When Liz Truss became Prime Minister on 6th September 2022, Grant Shapps was replaced by Anne Marie Trevelyan as Secretary of State for Transport. She is the MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed.
The MARPA AGM will be held on Saturday 15th October 2022 at 14:00 at the Friends Meeting House, St John's Street, Bury St Edmunds. The speakers will be Alan Neville of Greater Anglia and Charles Baker, Senior Public Affairs Manager at Network Rail.
The Wherry Lines Community Rail Partnership has worked with the Henderson Trust, New Routes Integration, the Broads Authority's National Lottery Heritage Funded project Water, Mills & Marshes, and Greater Anglia to host over 40 local young people and newly settled families on two train trips from Norwich to help discover the joys of the Broads National Park and the Suffolk Coast. These trips took place on 2nd (12 people) and 12th August (31 people).
On 7th September 2022 the 'Friends of Thetford Station' volunteers were awarded the 'Best Environmental Project' award, which is part of Thetford Town Council's 'Thetford In Bloom' competition for the wildlife garden they had created alongside the platform at Thetford station, which has been transformed over the years. They rcently received a grant and planning permission from Breckland Council to fund six specially-designed swift boxes, and worked with Network Rail to install them at the top of the Victorian station building. The 'Friends of Thetford Station' are part of Greater Anglia's volunteer Station Adoption initiative which sees local people getting involved at their local station for the benefit of the community.
RAIL FRANCHISES
Greater Anglia uses patronage figures for its main routes to calculate emissions savings through use of train rather than car
Keywords: [GreaterAnglia]
To mark 'Car Free Day' on 22 September 2022, Greater Anglia (GA) put five of its most-used routes through a carbon calculator, see greateranglia.co.uk/carbon-calculator using patronage data accumulated between 1st January and 31st August 2022, to show how enormous carbon savings that can be made if travelling by rail rather than by private road vehicle.
In those nine months, 8.5 million people travelled on the five routes, saved a combined 62.7 million kilograms of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) from being emitted into the atmosphere. That is equivalent to over 10 million tree seedlings growing for ten years, according to GA. The five routes, with their patronage and kg of CO2e from being released into the atmosphere if they had instead travelled by car, are as follows:
- London Liverpool Street to Stansted Airport - 2.8m people, 23.8m kg
- Chelmsford to London Liverpool Street - 2.2m people, 15m kg
- London Liverpool Street to Shenfield - 1.4m people, 6.5m kg
- Colchester to London Liverpool Street - 1.2m people, 14m kg
- Cheshunt to London Liverpool Street - 992,000 people, 3m kg
According to the Department for Transport (DfT), road transport is the biggest driver of CO2 emissions in the UK, with domestic transport being responsible in 2019 for emitting 122 million tonnes of CO2e, which was 27 per cent of the UK's total emissions that year. Rail accounted for just 1.4 per cent of transport emissions despite representing 10 per cent of all journeys.
News: https://news.railbusinessdaily.com/greater-anglia-highlights-rail-travel-carbon-savings/.
Railfuture East Anglia Branch News Snippets 354 - 30/09/2022
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