The rail industry should consider producing its own electric power – that is the view of Tony Marmont, renewable energy expert and Visiting Professor at Leicester’s De Montfort University. He told the Derby conference: “Wind turbines could offset the total carbon emissions of the whole rail network.”

Mr Marmont, who runs Beacon Energy, a not-for-profit organisation promoting renewable energy techniques, claimed investment in wind turbines could be paid back in less than four years.

He said use of renewable energy sources in the UK had been “pitiful”.

The Government has aimed to achieve 20 per cent of electricity generated from ‘renewables’ by 2020. But he forecast only five per cent would be achieved, and claimed it was only two per cent at present.

“Why shouldn’t the railway industry produce its own power?” he asked.

Mr Marmont said he was not speaking just about traction power but stations, buildings and depots – all of which could be equipped with their own wind turbines and other forms of renewable energy, such as heat pumps and hydrogen gas used with fuel cells to provide electricity and heat.

He said that, in terms of carbon dioxide per passenger kilometre, rail was the best form of transport. The emission ranges, depending on load factors, are rail, 38 per 100kms; bus, 95 per 130kms; car, 106 per150kms and short-haul aircraft, 148 per 300kms – similar to those in a chart shown by Derek Chapman of the DfT.

• Mr Marmont also told the conference that it was not generally known that coal contains uranium 235.

He maintained that, as a result, the power station at Radcliffe-on-Soar which, he said, provides electricity for over 400,000 homes in the East Midlands – and is alongside the site of the new East Midlands Parkway station, to be built on the Midland main line next year – has released more radiation into the environment than the Sellafield nuclear plant.