Environment

Our commitment to the environment 

We believe in green public transport – with rail travel being one of the most environmentally friendly ways to travel. Even though rail travel accounts for 10% of passenger miles (2019), it is responsible for just 1% of all transport emissions. We want to help reduce climate impacts by encouraging people off the roads onto our services. Operating in a socially and environmentally responsible way is important to us.

Did you know a single train can remove up to 500 cars from our roads?

Meeting your needs in an environmentally responsible way

Southeastern works together with industry partners, contractors, and suppliers to reduce our environmental impact and measure and report on our performance. We’re always looking for ways to improve how we work and go beyond what the law and regulation require of us – we know it’s what our passengers want and expect.

• We are proud to have achieved accreditation across the Southeastern business for ISO 14001 (Environment Management System) and ISO 50001 (Energy Management System).  
• Our train fleets are electric with energy for our mainline and metro services purchased from nuclear generation, see further down the page for more info.
• Three quarters of our trains feature special technology that generates electrical energy when the trains are braking to slow down – this is called regenerative braking. This energy is fed back into the system to power other trains. This results in 10% less electrical energy being needed to power our trains.
• We are modifying our highspeed trains so that they also regenerate electricity between St Pancras and Ashford, we estimate that this will reduce their energy use by 16.5%. This change has required detailed technical work.  They can already do this regeneration on the remainder of our network.
• We have installed almost 2,900 solar roof panels in our train servicing depots. In 2020/21 these solar panels produced enough electricity to power 166 households.
• We continue to replace lighting in our stations and train servicing depots with energy efficient LED lights. LED lights aren’t just more efficient, they provide better lighting and need less maintenance.

The future

We are committed to reducing our impact on the environment and to a net zero carbon impact. Under our new owners we are working on our plan for our journey to net zero and will share this plan during 2022. In the meantime, we continue to manage our environmental impacts by;

• Investing in energy improvements
• Diverting a high level of waste from landfill
• Encouraging our colleagues to look at new ways that we can reduce the environmental impact of our activities

Our use of electricity generated from nuclear sources

Nuclear generated electricity, provided through the national grid, is sourced to power our metro and mainline services and one train servicing depot. This energy is provided to us by Network Rail who maintain the metro and mainline rail network.

Our environmental and energy policy

Through innovation, we will drive continual environmental and energy improvements.

Curious to learn more? 

Download our Statement of Environmental and Energy Policy

Questions about our services?