Carbon Offsetting
Travelling by rail is generally more carbon efficient than travelling by car or plane. Reducing emissions from travel is a key challenge for the UK in its drive to reduce emissions. Your decision to travel by rail, is just one way in which you can help to reduce emissions and help to prevent the climate change impact of carbon emissions.
RailEasy are committed to the promotion of rail travel, but also wish to highlight the emissions benefits of rail travel. RailEasy are also including an offset of the rail emissions from your journey as part of their booking function, ensuring that your decision to travel by rail benefits the environment, both by emissions friendly travel and the mitigation of any emissions from your journey.
Every journey that you book with RailEasy will be offset using UK based offset products, delivered by The Carbon Consultancy, a carbon management company who specialise in supporting the UK travel sector to report, reduce and offset emissions from travel.
Every ton of carbon dioxide emitted from our customers rail travel will be offset using new tree planting in the UK and will include a donation to a primary school energy education project in the UK. More details on this can be found in the accompanying PDF files on this site. For further information please visit carbonresponsible, to learn more about travel emissions.
Using the latest government approved data sets for carbon emissions released by DEFRA in June 2007, here is a guide to how your journey by rail would compare to other forms of public and private transport in the UK for a journey from London to Manchester. The value for cars is based upon a single traveller but will reduce proportionally per passenger for each extra passenger in the car. Thus only four persons travelling in a small car or two persons travelling on a medium sized motorbike would emit less per person than travelling by rail.
The column on rail saving shows how much carbon dioxide you would save from this one journey as opposed to travelling on your own using any of the other transport types.
Travelling on the London to Manchester route by non rail transport would be the equivalent of the following number of rail journeys for selected transport types.
| 6 rail journeys | = 1 journey in a large petrol car |
| 5.3 rail journeys | = 1 journey in a large diesel car |
| 4. 5 rail journeys | = 1 journey in a large hybrid car |
| 2.6 journeys | = 1 journey on a large motorbike |
| 1.8 rail journeys | = 1 journey on a bus |
| Kgs CO2 | Rail Saving | |
| RAIL London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly | 17.71 | N/A |
| AIR London City Airport to Manchester | 43.07 | 25.36 |
| ROAD London (City Airport) to Central Manchester | ||
| Small Petrol Car | 65.20 | 47.49 |
| Medium Petrol Car | 76.99 | 59.28 |
| Large Petrol Car | 105.55 | 87.84 |
| Small Diesel Car | 53.66 | 35.95 |
| Medium Diesel Car | 66.98 | 49.27 |
| Large Diesel Car | 93.83 | 76.12 |
| Small Hybrid Car | 44.94 | 27.23 |
| Large Hybrid Car | 79.77 | 62.06 |
| Motorbike Medium | 33.44 | 15.73 |
| Motorbike Large | 45.79 | 28.08 |
| Bus | 31.73 | 14.02 |
Comparison produced by The Carbon Consultancy, July 2007, using its own reporting tools, DEFRA data and road distances from theaa.com