Emma Alexander
Sustainability Director, FirstGroup Rail
Welcome, Emma. Tell us a little about your career and your role as Rail Sustainability Director at FirstGroup?
I started my career in aviation. I spent 12 years working for Gatwick, Heathrow, and British Airways Association’s corporate office, first as an environment advisor then sustainability manager. I became head of environmental assurance, and then finally head of waste, water and land quality. I left to have children and set up my own business, and spent the next 10 years as a freelance sustainability consultant, working on a huge variety of projects. After the pandemic, I joined FirstGroup’s Rail Division as Head of Sustainability and was then promoted to Sustainability Director.
I've been in this role for around four years now. My team of four works on internal consultancy and engages with rail industry working groups, such as RSSB’s Air Quality working group which I chair, to facilitate change.
FirstRail has almost 400k passenger journeys per day across a range of rolling stock and locations. What are the universal sustainability challenges you see?
Since beginning this role, I’ve worked in partnership with RSSB developing the Sustainable Rail Blueprint, collaborating with train operating companies (TOCs), freight operating companies (FOCs), supply chain, and rolling stock operators. Now the Blueprint is in a crucial stage of implementation and revision. It covers 11 sustainability topic areas, and I think one big challenge is working out how to prioritise what we focus on. There are very limited funds available from government and, while we want to do everything, we have to decide where those funds are best placed.
Another universal challenge is decarbonisation. Ultimately, we'd all love the entire network to be electrified and eliminate diesel; that would also improve air quality and noise issues. But as a TOC or as a group, it's largely out of our control. What is in our control is decarbonising our Open Access fleet and procurement of new rolling stock – for example the recent introduction of bi-mode trains on Avanti West Coast to replace diesel. What we need to do is influencing: around the electrification strategy for the network through Great British Railways (GBR), and alternative solutions for the short and medium term.
Articulating the wider benefit of rail decarbonisation is a third challenge. Look at ‘avoided emissions’, for example. We may be growing our business, creating new journeys, and increasing our direct carbon emissions—but actually what we're doing is reducing emissions from the overall transport network by taking cars off the road and planes out of the sky. Explaining that to people can be difficult. As cars and planes decarbonise and get cleaner, we must maintain our position as a green travel choice.
Some of your work has focused on sustainability benchmarking. How does this kind of data usage advance sustainability in the rail sector?
Benchmarking helps us understand how we're performing, compared with other TOCs and with other sectors. One example is how we benchmark the carbon intensity of different rolling stock. We look at our different rolling stock and compare the carbon emissions to understand which assets are more carbon intensive. Getting granular, you can actually start benchmarking against individual trains and drivers. This helps us understand the difference in fuel consumption and fuel burn based on different driver behaviour or routes. Then we compare that internally and with other TOCs. We can highlight outliers and understand what we can do to improve and further reduce fuel use.
Another use case is around social value. We've been using RSSB’s Rail Social Value Tool (RSVT) with our TOCs for several years. It’s really useful to benchmark against other TOCs and organisations to understand what social value we're creating and identify where we can improve. The RSVT is a really interesting tool that takes in all sorts of data to create a monetary value, such as data about apprenticeships, training, employment opportunities, community, and the environment.
First Rail is very involved with cross-industry groups. When it comes to sustainability is collaboration the key to future-proofing our sector?
Answer? Absolutely. I chair the Air Quality Working Group, and I’m also involved in the Sustainable Rail Leadership Group and the Sustainable Rail Executive, which are all facilitated by RSSB. The working groups are a really great way of sharing best practice and learning from each other. Our industry has got to a position where we’re being much more collaborative on this topic especially. Ultimately, as sustainability professionals, we all want the same thing. Hopefully the creation of Great British Railways will continue to prioritise sustainability and further encourage cross-industry collaboration.
Your holdings include electric powered trains and you have successfully completed a fast-charging battery train trial with GWR. How is the landscape for alternate power in rail improving?
There have been some trials that show quite a lot of potential for electric and battery power in the UK.
We’ve been operating Lumo, a fully electric powered fleet, since 2021. We recently carried out an ‘avoided emissions’ study. It looked at the emissions that were avoided by people taking the Lumo service rather than flying or driving. It involved a lot of data to understand what modes of transport people were using before Lumo. The results? More than eight times the organisational emissions of Lumo were avoided through people not flying and not driving. That was quite groundbreaking. The Great Western Railway battery train trial with the rapid charging on the Greenford Branch line has also been very interesting, and very successful. It's shown the viability of using battery trains on on-branch lines, and that they've got an even better range than we initially hoped. The charge time is really, really quick as well. This trial shows a lot of potential for battery routes, and more battery trains on branch lines.
Other rolling stock manufacturers have done trials with bi-mode trains. For example, you've got diesel-electric trains, can you swap out one of the diesel engines with batteries? TransPennine trains recently did a trial on an intercity train where they replaced one of the diesel engines with battery. Again, it was very successful. As well as decarbonisation and reducing energy costs, it’s a good opportunity to improve station air quality and noise—going the last mile in and first mile out of a station by battery. We are keen to learn from this trial with a view to utilising battery power on our Open Access Routes.
Finally, what do you think is rail's greatest under-appreciated strength?
We create good-quality jobs, apprenticeships, training, and invest in communities. We have a great story to tell about the social sustainability and value we create through social integration, our supply chain, our purchasing power, our TOCs, and of course, freight. We produce social value reports to showcase the social benefits and value delivered by rail―it would be great to see those reports getting the attention and use they deserve.