This page was updated in May 2021
Was the Expressway designed to keep freight on the roads?
The Oxford-Cambridge expressway was referred to as the ‘missing link’ connecting the M1 near Milton Keynes to the M4 just North of Newbury. It would certainly have been a missing link in the UK freight transport network which includes the ports of Felixstowe and Southampton that handle the majority of UK container traffic. Each of these ports currently uses the M25 as a major route for its freight (Felixstowe’s bound for Wales and the South-West and Southampton’s bound for Birmingham). The expressway ‘missing link’ would have become the ‘outer M25’ for freight, relieving the M25 of at least one quarter of its current load, and handling up to 1.3 million HGV movements a year.
Europe’s TENtec freight routes
The European Union identified ten major routes across Europe for trans-border trade between the EU countries. These are shown colour-coded in the metro-style map below.
UK’s TENtec freight routes
The TENtec routes in the UK are shown on the right, to which has been added in red a link representing the expressway. With that ‘missing link’, traffic from Felixstowe for example (that handles 48% of UK container traffic) would be able to get from the M1 to the M4 without going via London.
The ‘Missing Link’ is the Ox-Cam Arc
The idea of such a freight link was put forward in the November 2016 ‘Oxford to Cambridge Strategic Study Stage 3 Report’43, as shown below.
Routes in blue on this map are present HGV routes that would be relieved of some of their traffic by the construction of the expressway. The blue quadrant at bottom right of the image is the M25. The two blue spokes coming off the M25 are the M1 and the M4 motorways.
The red lines in the image are routes that would take up the HGV traffic shed from the blue routes. The thicker the lines in this figure, the greater the HGV traffic. The thickest red line of all – the missing link – is, of course, the Ox-Cam expressway, that was expected to handle 1.3 million HGV movements a year, an average of two every minute.
And that’s just HGVs. There would have been a similar increase in LGVs and other large traffic if the expressway had gone ahead.
An alternative solution for freight?
As with the car-dependent commute to work, which should be replaced by public transport alternatives, so with freight. Railways can carry freight and should be designed to do so. At present we do not know what will be the freight carrying characteristics of East-West Rail.
Lines that carry both freight and passenger trains need freight loops so that faster passenger trains can over-take slower freight trains. The freight loop provison on EWR is very unclear. Originally we understood that freight loops would be included. More recently we heard that they will not be. Please contact us at noexpresswaygroup@gmail.com if you have any more information.
In Germany they are working to get more freight onto the railways and take it off the roads, why aren’t we?
The demise of the expressway in March 2021 raises real questions about the future of freight across the Ox-Cam Arc area. England’s Economic Heartland’s 13 road corridors do not cover much of Cambridge at all, and so do not seem to be anticipating taking over the expressway’s freight-carrying role.