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At the moment around 350,000 container boxes pass through Teesport every year. The new Northern gateway container terminal will mean that, by 2020, we could be seeing up to 1.5 million containers pass through the port every year.

The port's owners, PD Ports say that, by bringing goods for the North of the UK through Teesport, rather than a southern port, the number of lorries on our roads will drastically decrease.

That may be little comfort for people living around Teesside, though, as moving the extra containers by road would see four times as many lorries a year travelling through the region, onto the A1, A66 and A19.

The Solution

The plan is to let the train take the strain. PD Ports wants 20% of everything that comes in to be taken away by rail.

Teesport's rail terminal

There are already 14 trains a week stopping at Teesport, 5 or 6 from Cleveland Potash, the same from Corus Steel and one train a day carrying cargo containers to and fro to each of Workington, Manchester and Glasgow.

In the next 15 years, they hope to get 10 more of these trains to Teesport every day.

The group, Freight on Rail, say that would take a third of a million lorries a year off our roads, but it would require an upgrade of the East Coast Mainline.

The government wants to spend 拢200 million upgrading lines to take freight in the next five years, but so far the 拢40 million plan to upgrade the East Coast Mainline hasn't been approved.

Most containers travel by lorry

The Maths

Those ten trains could take five hundred containers a day, removing 50 HGVs from our roads. Since each lorry has to make a return journey, it would be equivalent to 100 lorry movements a day. The trains would run to Manchester, Workington and Glasgow, an average trip of 130 miles each way.

That means the trains would save 13,000 road miles a day (at an estimated cost of 拢1.50 per road mile) , five days a week, 52 weeks a year.

The average HGV generates 180 grammes of carbon dioxide per tonne mile, while rail freight generates around 1/5 of that, according to Freight on Rail, putting the CO2 saving of the scheme at just short of 500 tonnes.

The Container Problem

Modern cargo containers are 9'6" (2.9m), a foot taller than the older models. This means that, not only would the scheme need the estimated 拢4m to link Teesport up to the East Coast Mainline, it would require another 拢36m to upgrade the line itself to take the containers.