We cannot just stand still

LTG Cargo’s CEO points out that the share of sustainable transport modes (rail, inland waterways) in long-distance transport has decreased over the past three years. This is a challenge, she says, yet a challenge that is already known to the sector, together with several other issues.

“The industry is aware of these challenges and has analysed them exhaustively. Brussels has also pledged to find solutions,” she underlines. However, she also stresses that the rail freight sector should fulfil its part by finding and providing innovative solutions to improve its competitiveness and attractiveness to customers, not just standing still and waiting.

Using legislation as a basis

In this sense, legislation, no matter its faults and their expected amendments, should be used as a basis for the rail freight sector’s growth. For that to happen, the industry must listen to the market. A good example that Sime uses is that increasingly more businesses Europe-wide are feeling increased pressure from their customers in terms of ensuring that the products they distribute are sustainable, but are also transported in a sustainable manner.

This is an opportunity that the rail freight sector should grasp. “With businesses looking for new, innovative and more sustainable ways of transportation, and at the same time, greater integration of the entire transport system,” the rail transport sector has a great case to offer, says Sime.

“Therefore, the entire transport sector needs to continue its activities in the intended direction and promote changes. As a business sector, our responsibility to consumers is to ensure more sustainable journeys for their goods, and to enable logistics partners and customers to choose a green course in their operations,” concludes Sime.

The first train left Cuneo on 8 June and reached Treviso the next morning, travelling during the night, as a spokesperson from Logistica Uno told RailFreight.com. Cuneo is near Vinadio, the source of Sant’Anna waters, whereas Treviso is an important pivot point to distribute goods all over the Italian northeast. The road network in this area is very often congested and, as the spokesperson pointed out, it is currently difficult to find truck drivers as well. For the westbound Treviso-Cuneo route, the last empty slots still need to be filled.

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IMTRON is the company in charge of production and sale of four brands that are part of the MediaMarkt portfolio: KOENIC, PEAQ, ok., and ISY. KOENIC focuses on the house appliances sector while PEAQ specialises in consumer electronics. Ok. develops cheaper electronic devices and house appliances. Finally, ISY produces higher-end mobile accessories.

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Currently, VR transports over 5 million cubic metres of Metsa’s wood and mechanical wood products, plus over 2 million tonnes of other forest industry products every year. Both parties were contacted with questions regarding which specific routes would be moved to the rail, but no answer has been provided as of yet.

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First domestic intermodal service

The rail service represents Maritime’s first domestic intermodal service, which will see the movement of 34’ x 45’ heavily modified containers by rail six days per week. Maritime’s distribution fleet will deliver the bottles to the final destination: the CCEP’s warehousing sites.

The new service means an expansion of Maritime and CCEP’s existing partnership. Maritime has provided the bottler with distribution services since 2017. “As a business, we know that to reduce our overall carbon emissions, we need to work with our supply chain partners to continue making meaningful strides towards our business goals”, commented Francisco Javier Sanchez Gandarias, vice president Customer Service and Supply Chain at Coca- Cola Europacific Partners Great Britain.

Why are rail sidings important?

Rail sidings are the gateway for businesses to the railway network. Be it a warehouse, a factory or even an energy production plant, companies that have strong supply chains need dedicated rail lines to receive or send out cargo. The former German federal transport minister Andreas Scheuer had highlighted the importance of sidings in the past: “the shorter and easier the route to the rail, the more likely companies are to transport their goods by rail. With a siding right in front of the door or a loading station nearby, the decision is easier,” he stressed in the past.

Also, Sigrid Nikutta, DB’s executive for freight transport, has underlined that for companies or municipalities who want to get into rail logistics, a siding for a workshop or industrial park is the right way to go. In fact, DB is eager to help companies find their way around rail sidings, and it did so almost a year ago.

Specifically, DB Cargo reactivated a 300-metre-long siding belonging to Autoverwertung Möck (AV Möck), a waste disposal specialist company in Tübingen, Germany. The siding was in disuse since 2014, but with DB, AV Möck managed to put its cargo back on rail wagons again. “Without rail freight, there’s no way we could ever become climate neutral, and that goes for our home city of Tübingen, too,” stressed back then Marie Möck, responsible for controls in the disposal specialist company.

Is there a plan?

DB and AV Möck’s story is a sufficient example of how rail sidings can help companies make their supply chain greener. It also shows that no matter the industry, there is always space for more rail. However, private initiatives like the one mentioned here are not enough. Does Germany have central planning on this matter?

The answer is yes. The former and current German federal governments had positioned rail on top of their agendas, and sidings were not missing. Since 2017, when the German rail freight masterplan was deployed, rail sidings and their funding would be paramount to growing rail freight in the country.

The masterplan explicitly mentioned that “​​the rail freight sector is to have […] direct nationwide access to points of origin and final destinations of traffic via private sidings,” “industrial and logistics sites that generate a high volume of freight should have a private siding,” and that “single wagonload services first require that a site be made spatially accessible by rail and that a private siding is in place.”

Additionally, it highlighted that funding “combined transport terminals and private sidings” and “multimodal facilities as access points to the single wagonload services including private sidings” should be a permanent task for the federal government and the federal transport of ministry, respectively.

The coalition government, elected in November 2021, also pledged to provide more investment incentives for train sidings. Yet, despite plans and promises, the German rail freight sector does not see many such projects implemented.

The sector’s response

VDV has invested a lot in lobbying the importance of promoting and incentivising rail sidings. The association has compiled a charter for this purpose since “despite the desire for more rail and a federal siding subsidy program, the number of sidings in Germany is falling yearly”. To contribute to rail freight traffic growth, railway network “access points for customers must be significantly strengthened,” adds VDV.

More particularly, VDV claims that, among others, “sufficient sidings and customer-oriented access points should be available to shift traffic and to relieve the regional/municipal areas of ​​road freight traffic”. For this purpose, the association has compiled some critical steps that the German government should take to meet its initial goals and improve them.

Those steps are not complicated but indicate that the German government could have a more practical and direct approach to the matter. For instance, reducing bureaucracy, simplifying regulations and improving rail siding subsidies could be a good first step. Additionally, it demands a reduced cost to connect to the public grid. The government could also achieve this via better subsidies. Moreover, the proximity of rail sidings to customers and commercial areas is also crucial. At the same time, new transport concepts that include rail and better last/first mile solutions could also help companies increase their interest towards their sidings and shift to rail.

Are those demands realistic?

At first glance, VDV does not ask much. As mentioned, the proposed measures are essential and mainly focus on incentivising companies to consider using rail and facilitate even more the ones that already do.
After all, for a country like Germany, where rail freight is an integral part of the economy, rail sidings all over the country should be a top priority. Even if the federal government decides to take the next step and reapproach the sidings matter, it will not be the first in Europe to do so. A few months ago, Adif, the Spanish infrastructure manager, launched a project that could be a good case study for Germany. And if Spain can do that, why not also Germany?

In particular, Adif launched a rail sidings extension project in multiple rail freight stations in Spain last May. The purpose is to extend sidings to 750 metres and provide more space for efficient rail freight operations according to national and international standards. The project might not particularly concern private sidings, but it indicates their importance in growing rail freight volumes in general. Extending existing and building new sidings in crucial nodes surrounded by logistical areas was Spain’s first step to incentivise companies to use more rail.

For Germany, things could be even easier. The governmental will and funding are there, the rail freight sector’s will and technical knowledge are also there, and the same applies to customers’ demand for better accessibility. What is missing is better coordination and a more open approach to utilising resources and funding better. These could be the ingredients for a German success to be followed by others.

Also read:

• Adif extends rail sidings all over Spain to the benefit of rail freight
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As neutral as possible

This caravan of trucks is now being replaced by rail transport, carried out by DB Cargo. “The switch will reduce carbon emissions by around 2,600 tons every year. Wherever possible, Audi uses DB Cargo’s DBeco plus service – for example, currently for the legs of the route in Austria and Germany, the service sources power exclusively from renewable sources such as wind, water, or solar energy, making transport carbon-free”, Audi explains.

In Hungary and Belgium, Audi uses DBeco neutral. With this product, the power used for transportation is offset by means of climate certificates, reducing carbon emissions elsewhere.

Logistics centre

The supplier of the battery modules in Hungary does not have its own rail siding. Therefore, DB Cargo recently put a logistics centre into operation at the Győr site. At the weather-protected centre, battery modules are reloaded from trucks to rail cars for delivery. The modules are first picked up from the manufacturer by truck and transported from the Győr LC more than 1,000 kilometers by rail to Brussels.

Initially, a lightweight hall was built in the immediate vicinity of the Audi plant in Győr; an additional expansion is already being planned. In order to meet the high quality and safety requirements for battery modules and cells, the Audi Supply Chain team uses a digital information platform and special sensor technology to monitor the temperature and any shocks in the rail cars.

More to come

By 2025, Audi aims to transport these components exclusively by train. At Audi’s headquarters in Ingolstadt, for example, everything is ready to go for the production of batteries using modules and cells shipped by rail; the batteries will then be used to manufacture Audi models on site. New equipment and processes have been installed specifically for this purpose.

Other plants are already waiting in the wings to switch to rail delivery of battery components. Similarly, a large share of the finished products are also shipped by rail: Today, around 68 percent of Audi vehicles in Europe already leave the plants by rail, a figure that is set to only increase in the future.

“Investment in electric drive trains can be a good idea for the entire green transport corridor as you can choose direct electric power, batteries or fuels cells such as hydrogen,” Laure Roux, Administrator for economic affairs at the CCNR said, adding that “there is very active policy in some CCNR members states on financing land side energy infrastructure.”

Transition

The CCNR’s latest roadmap for reducing inland navigation emissions proposes adoption of a “tank-to-wake” model, that calculates the energy and emissions impacts for transport across all modes within the corridor helping to integrate the benefits of low-emission rail freight.

Funding this transition is set to be a major challenge across all transport modes over the next decade and Roux predicts that new financial frameworks will necessarily be developed at the regional level to support this shift, noting that “an idea being looked into is to setup a financial instrument to aid this development, based on mixed sources.”

Cecilia Braun, Director of Interregional Alliance for the Rhine-Alpine Corridor (EGTC) reinforced this during a recent panel event on cross-border cooperation for sustainable transport, noting that while a European fund to finance this development has not yet been established. “It is surprising that something like this does not yet exist” as “air to rail and road to rail are key targets that need to be put out there more often in order to drive behavioural change.”

Carbon-neutral Rhine-Alpine corridor

The EGTC has also recently developed a roadmap for a carbon-neutral Rhine-Alpine corridor and Braun highlighted the need for ‘long term goals’ and greater cross-border cooperation as well as the importance “to have very clear administrative goals”.

“Identifying and eliminating infrastructure capacity problems of rail freight transport on the Corridor is still key for reducing emissions by modal shift as some bottleneck areas negatively impact reliability and therefore curtail the uptake of rail freight,” Braun notes.

The CCNR roadmap meanwhile suggests that there will be a significant divergence in costs under differencing development scenarios within the Rhine valley transport corridor, adding pressure for funding for new networks to be accelerated. Under a ‘conservative pathway’, the CCNR expects a total accumulated financial gap of €€2.65 billion in the average price scenario, while for an ‘innovative pathway’ that involves accelerated development the total accumulated financial gap is forecast to reach €7.8 billion in the average price scenario.

Hurdles on the road

“The economic, technical, social and regulatory aspects all need to be tackled and we see three main types of challenges: legal requirement, voluntary measures and financial measures,” Benjamin Boyer, Administrator of ship technique at CCNR, said.

Headquartered in Strasbourg, France, the CCNR is an international organisation comprising five member states – Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland – and works closely with the European Commission as well as other national river commissions.

Other modalities are more adaptable, he says. Van de Camp identifies a lack of market opening, competition and innovation in the railways as an important obstacle to further steps and also points to the presence of ‘slow state-owned companies’.

Modal shift

According to the ambassador, the rail sector is still an expensive sector compared to other modalities. The ambassador advocates lowering the rail user fee in the context of climate policy. He also stated that more investments should be made in TEN-T corridors for 740-meter trains and the diversion of freight transport outside the city centres.

In the end, there is also a mental shift needed among shippers. They need to start asking themselves what sustainability is worth to them, he concludes.

The report can be downloaded here.

This article is a translation of a publication on Nieuwsblad Transport, our sister webiste.

Insufficient information

The discussion about the modal shift and a green transition in transport has been around for a while. However, many people are still unaware of the benefits that using rail could bring to their business. In this case, there is no one else to blame than the rail freight sector, which has not communicated its benefits sufficiently. “There is a need for such a campaign, as many shippers and carriers do not yet know about all available solutions in rail freight”, said Ruckes.

The initiative has already launched its website with the support of many industry stakeholders like the platform provider Rail-Flow, the rail rental company Railpool and the railway undertaking Eisenbahngesellschaft Potsdam (EGP). Additionally, it is supported by the associations Allianz pro Schiene, Netzwerk Europäischer Eisenbahnen (NEE) and UIRR.

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