THE JAGUAR RAILHEAD

DISTRIBUTION EFFICIENCY

Every Jaguar is born for the road, but many start their first journey on rails. Our Castle Bromwich plants operates its own railhead and, at 5.30 precisely every weekday morning, the Jaguar Express sets off with 176 brand new Jaguars.

Protected from the elements inside two-tier covered wagons, the cars arrive at Southampton by 11.10am. Here, they are unloaded and shipped off to the US, the Middle East, Japan or any one of Jaguar's 63 overseas markets, by the end of the day.

Prior to the construction of the Jaguar terminal, sited across the road from the Castle Bromwich assembly plant, it would have required around 22 lorry transporters to haul those 176 cars to the docks at Southampton.

That's a lot of road miles, expensive fuel and emissions. Additionally, the plant is adjacent to one of the most congested motorways in the UK, so using rail offsets this impact as well as improving our own distribution efficiency.

It is estimated that by 2013, 10 years since the railhead opened, train transportation from Castle Bromwich will have removed a staggering 45 million truck miles from Britain's road network.

There's a real environmental benefit when we transport our cars by train. Today, around 70% of our production goes by rail, and we're hoping that will increase.

Distribution efficiencies are included in the Lifecycle Assessment of our vehicles to measure their total environmental impact. Learn about the results of this study for the Jaguar XJ in our interactive experience.