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Rail Industry Keeps Innovation On The Right Track
23 December 2025
Carbon reduction within the industry
In November Network Rail, Southern Renewals Enterprise and Volker Rail announced the completion of the UK’s first low-carbon track renewal project.
The replacement of 1,150 yards of plain line track with low carbon materials including low-carbon concrete across a stretch of railway between Honor Oak Park and Forest Hill in South London is an encouraging example of green-first renewals as Network Rail looks to achieve its own Net Zero goals.
The project is forecasted to result in a 63% reduction in carbon emissions and is the first time that all three primary track components of rail, sleepers and ballast used along the route have achieved verified carbon reductions.
Smaller projects like these can help to build up a picture of the quiet carbon revolution that is finally coming to fruition, moving off the design pages and into reality.
A decade in the making
Decarbonisation has been a challenge the rail infrastructure sector has been reckoning with for nearly a decade.
The release of Network Rail’s Environmental and Social Performance Policy in 2017 outlined key objectives for improving operational energy and carbon efficiency through a framework of energy and carbon saving measures. This would be achieved through the introduction of innovation, in addition to encouraging energy efficiency and ensuring carbon management throughout the entire supply chain.
These objectives not only provided the entire industry with guidance on how to proactively accomplish the manufacture and installation of carbon efficient solutions throughout the rail industry, but highlighted the importance of collaboration throughout every stage of the design, installation and maintenance phases. This can ensure a consistent and long term approach to achieving net zero.
The collective approach to decarbonising the rail network actioned by rail providers manufacturers and contractors on the design and manufacture of building products has been to the credit of the sector.
Ibstock Anderton’s approach to embodied carbon
At Ibstock Anderton the challenge was simple to understand, but tougher to deliver: how do we remove carbon from our mainly concrete based products without compromising the quality and assurance our products have delivered for many years?
Necessity is the mother of invention, and this design challenge allowed us to rewrite the expectations of what precast concrete products could do and now our bestselling concrete cable trough (C/1/9) has 22.5% less embodied carbon compared to the previous design (based on A1-A3 GWP). We managed to reduce the embodied carbon by replacing traditional cement with Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag (GGBS) in the manufacturing process.
This product has an EPD that demonstrates we have one of the lowest carbon Concrete Cable Troughs on the market.
This is the same troughing used on the Colne Valley Viaduct as part of the HS2 project.
The success of this process allowed us to apply the thinking to our platform copers, and we have been able to reduce the embodied carbon by a substantial 35%, which is a key benefit of our G-Tech Coper.
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