Despite growing concern over Scotland’s creaking road infrastructure, innovative projects designed to shift timber freight to alternative modes of transport continue to be mired in doubts over funding, it emerged at the recent Timber Transport Forum annual seminar in Dunblane.

Alan McAra, harvesting director at John Gordon & Son Ltd of Nairn, captured this theme in describing a barge/ship scheme which, over the past two years, has in shipped 30,000 tonnes of timber from the Western Isles to the company’s mill facilities, thereby eliminating around 200,000 miles of lorry movements. But he warned: ‘For this project to continue, funding is desperately required.’

Similarly, John Scott of haulier JST described progress towards establishing a railhead at Barrhill in South Ayrshire to assist the flow of an estimated 500,000 tonnes of timber produced in the Galloway region each year. A Freight Facilities Grant (FFG) application was due to be lodged before the end of May and Mr Scott asserted: ‘Without the Scottish Executive coming up with money, it won’t happen.’

Little comfort

Scottish Executive spokesperson David Eaglesham was able to offer little in the way of comfort, pointing out that demand for FFGs exceeded supply and that the government had to balance a wide variety of competing needs with a limited amount of funds.

Funding issues provided the core of the day’s debate. At the outset, Scotland’s deputy minister for the environment and rural development Allan Wilson explained that £70m had been included in councils’ capital allocations for the three years to March 2004 to help overcome the road and bridge repair backlog in Scotland, while a further £36m was being made available in FFGs to assist the transfer of freight from road to other modes of transport.

Alistair Speedie, Dumfries & Galloway officer, noted that his own authority’s allocation for forestry route improvements had slumped from £1.16m in 1996/97 to £141,000 the following year and had remained well below the £500,000 mark ever since. For most councillors, provision of safer school routes, for example, was a higher priority, he said.

Catherine Cantrill, formerly project officer with the Argyll Timber Transport Group (ATTG) but now with Forest Enterprise, described the halting progress of a £6m scheme to remove five million tonnes of timber freight from local public roads over the next 20 years through the creation of 150km of ‘strategic haul routes’.

Unsuccessful bid

A project group comprising Forest Enterprise, Forestry Commission, Argyll and Bute Council and the private forestry sector was unsuccessful in its March 2001 bid for almost £3m of funding under the EU‘s Highlands and Islands Special Transitional Programme 2000-2006. An unexpected change in the rules meant no new applications could be submitted until September this year. AATG will decide shortly on whether to submit a scaled-down application in time for the September deadline, said Ms Cantrill.

Against a similar backdrop of funding worries, the barge and railhead projects have progressed somewhat against the odds. John Scott of JST highlighted the considerable time and money required to drive forward the Barrhill railhead project to the point where an FFG application is now scheduled to be made.

Fragility was also highlighted by Frank MacCulloch, chairman of the Highland Timber Transport Group, and Frank Roach of the Highland Rail Partnership in describing a £100,000 railside loading bank project at Kinbrace in the north of Scotland to allow ‘landlocked’ timber to be brought to market. Under an agreement between Highland Council and Forest Enterprise, timber from 7,500 acres of maturing forests at Naver and Rimsdale will be transhipped to rail at the new bank. This is expected to keep 150 laden timber trucks per month off the single lane A897.

Highland Rail Partnership

The EU Objective 1 funded project was co-ordinated by the Highland Rail Partnership and received ‘crucial’ additional funding from Railtrack, freight operator EWS and Highland Council. Completed in April, the facility is designed to hold 3,000 tonnes of timber to be moved over one week to ensure economies of scale for the train operator.

Other new developments flagged up at the seminar included a pilot scheme in Wales to test satellite tracking technology. ‘Black boxes’ and aerials have been fitted to four of BSW Timber‘s lorries to enable system interrogators to monitor the location of the vehicles, average speed, destination and the routes taken.

According to Steve Lavery, timber operations manager at Tilhill Harvesting, information technology can be harnessed to provide details of, for example, earnings per vehicle, drivers’ hours, unplanned stoppages and detours. The daily cost was estimated at £4 per vehicle, payable possibly through a cost recovery levy.