Colas Rail

Formerly known as Seco Rail, Colas Rail is a rail freight operator owned by French industrial group Bouygues

A Colas Rail tamping machine stabled in the sidings north of Preston station, on the eastern side of the West Coast Main Line Photo: El Pollock

Colas Rail is one of Europe’s leading suppliers of railway infrastructure services. The organisation is split into three different sections:

• Rail infrastructure
• Rail services
• Rail urban

The infrastructure section covers all railway construction and maintenance activities for Network Rail. The services section consists of freight activities and rail grinding and strategic plants services and the urban section is dedicated to urban rail construction and maintenance.

Combined together the different sections of Colas Rail cover all aspects of rail infrastructure, high-speed and light rail as well as being a national freight operator.

Rolling stock

Colas Rail currently operates an extensive fleet of railway assets: 130 locomotives, 500 wagons and two track-laying trains. As well as three ballast clearing machines, 32 ballast tampers, three stabilisers, 13 ballast regulators, 55 road-rail vehicles, 15 loaders, and three concreting trains, across the twenty countries in which it operates.

Following on from a shift away from freight operations towards rolling stock maintenance it expanded its rolling stock maintenance business in October 2016 by establishing a new French subsidiary, Ramfer.

Colas Rail Freight Class 56 approaches Hereford
Photo: Philip Pankhurst

Awards

Colas Rail was shortlisted for the 2017 United Kingdom Rail Industry Awards (UKIRA) in the Workforce Safety category for its Road Risk Reduction Programme.

Committed to tackling road safety, the Road Risk Reduction Programme is a holistic scheme designed to impact every area of the business which reduced vehicle accidents by fifty per cent in just six months.