EUROPE: Combined transport company Hupac says railways in eastern France need to be enhanced to ensure the long-term reliability of north-south European freight services by offering an alternative to routes through Germany.
Following three years of preparation, SBB Cargo International, Captrain France, DB InfraGo and SNCF Réseau ran a diesel shuttle service on the non-electrified Wörth – Lauterbourg – Strasbourg – Offenburg route during a three-week closure of the direct route along the River Rhein in Germany during August.
Hupac CEO Michail Stahlhut said this was ’a groundbreaking concept, which overcame numerous technical and administrative hurdles thanks to a committed Franco-German-Swiss co-operation’. The weak point of the diversion proved to be the low capacity at transfer sites, and the diversionary route reached its capacity limit.
On September 9 Hupac Chairman Hans-Jörg Bertschi called for the industry and policymakers to ‘build on this pioneering achievement’, and for Swiss modal shift policy to include French access routes to the north-south corridors through Switzerland. He said limited capacity in Germany has led to stagnation of modal shift in Switzerland, and planned major blockades in Germany will aggravate the situation until after 2030.
Hupac is calling for the Belgium – Metz – Strasbourg – Basel route to be upgraded to provide 4 m clearances so that traffic from Belgium and the southern Netherlands which currently goes through Germany could take the 110 km shorter route through France.
‘In view of the decades-long backlog in the development of the rail axis on the right bank of the Rhein, increasing traffic via France is the only option’ to prevent stagnation or a reversal in modal shift, said Bertschi. He suggested that Switzerland could provide targeted subsidies for gauge enhancement in France, as it has already done in Italy.
