Two haulage companies are to receive £5.8m to help remove 1.5 million timber lorry miles from Scotland’s roads every year.
The Scottish Executive announced this week that JST Services (Rail) will receive £5.2m towards the construction of a new rail head at Barrhill, South Ayrshire and a custom built freight train with a built-in mobile crane. This will enable the company to transport timber by rail from the forest of Galloway to Ayr, Carlisle, Troon and Chirk in Wales.
WH Malcolm will receive nearly £600,000 to transport plasterboard by rail from Cumbria to its rail facility at Paisley. All the funding is coming from the Scottish Executive’s Freight Facilities Grant.
Rob Soutar, Forestry Commission Scotlanb’s district manager for Galloway, said the railhead would help mnarkedly reduce the impact of timber traffic on communities and single track roads in south-west Scotland.
He added: “The new locomotives which are integral to the Barrhill initiative promise to facilitate the transport of timber by rail in many other parts of Scotland too.”
