East Midlands Trains, part of the Stagecoach Group, scooped the award for Environmental Excellence at the prestigious National Rail Awards last night (Thursday 16 September).
Beating off competition from other train companies throughout the country, the judges praised East Midlands Trains for its comprehensive organisation-wide green strategy that is already producing big results and promises even more for the future.
As part of the company’s plan to reduce its carbon footprint and make rail an even greener way to travel, staff at all levels of the company have committed to more than 140 different actions including changes to trains, stations and maintenance depots.
Over the summer, East Midlands Trains has launched two new major successful initiatives to improve the environmental impact of its trains. The first is the use of a fuel additive in the trains used on its local routes, which is already demonstrating a 4.4% reduction in fuel consumption, and is the equivalent of taking 350 cars off the road every year. The second initiative is the introduction of a new engine standby mode on the company’s Meridian trains which is set to save 800,000 litres of fuel every year, enough to fill 20 articulated road tankers!
Collecting the award of behalf of East Midlands Trains were David Maxwell, Safety & Environment Director and Matt Browne, Head of Environment. David commented: “This is a fantastic achievement and is recognition of the hard work and support all of our staff who are enthusiastically delivering this strategy day in, day out. We’re really proud to win such an important and prestigious award which helps to show that our commitment to providing greener rail travel is having a real impact.”
East Midlands Trains also picked up the Highly Commended Award for Innovation of the Year for its ‘interactive virtual train’ programme that is being used to train drivers and other staff more easily and efficiently.
East Midlands Trains is part of the Stagecoach Group, a company well known for its green credentials. The Group has launched a new sustainability strategy and is investing £11million in a range of measures to meet its environmental targets. It is also targeting an overall reduction of 8% in buildings CO2 emissions and a cut of 3% in annual fleet transport CO2e emissions. It follows a reduction in the carbon intensity of its UK businesses of 5.7% in the three years to 30 April 2009.
Earlier this year, Stagecoach became the first Scottish-based transport group - and one of only two listed UK public transport operators - to be awarded the prestigious Carbon Trust Standard after taking action on climate change by measuring and reducing its carbon emissions. The stretching carbon reduction benchmark covers all of the Group’s bus and rail operations in the UK.