AusRAIL conference themes 'timely reminders' to industry

AusRAIL PLUS 2011 – the largest rail event of the year and the biggest AusRAIL held to date – kicked off with a bang yesterday, with the event focused around this year’s two conference themes, Innovation and Customer Relations.

ARA chief executive Bryan Nye told Rail Express that the conference themes are “timely reminders” to industry that it must “band together” to become increasingly innovative and improve its service offering to customers in order to be able to meet the record demand for freight and passenger rail across the country.

Over the past two years, freight rail movements in Australia increased by a record 18% to 853.5 million tonnes per annum. Passenger trips grew to 769.9 million annual journeys – an increase of more than 6%.

Nye says this growth is equivalent to moving an additional 178,000 tonnes of freight by rail each and every day and an additional 60,000 customers using rail’s passenger network each week.

“For each additional one million tonnes of freight to go by rail, a new train set, more tracks, more engineers and more technicians are required. The same goes for our passenger networks. While every jurisdiction is purchasing new rolling stock, these will only meet today’s increase in capacity,” he says.

“Much more will be needed in the future, especially if we are going to replace the 30-year-old locomotives on our tracks today. Australia’s rail industry must work collaboratively to develop innovative and progressive ways to increase the capacity of rail’s freight and passenger networks.”

Nye says an industry weakness when it comes to customer relations is the need for rail freight operators to work harder at improving their service offering in order to attract new - as opposed to existing - customers.

In terms of innovation, Nye says one of the industry's biggest successes is rail's heavy haul operations which are recognised as being first class around the world.

"Our challenge however, is to achieve the same successes in our passenger and non-bulk freight operations so we can position rail as Australia’s long-term sustainable transport solution," he says.

For an in-depth analysis of how Australia’s rail freight industry is faring with customer relations, see the AusRAIL (November) print edition of Rail Express.