Source many constraints for businesses, rail transport has the advantage of being much less polluting than the truck. The climate emergency and the reorganization of his governance give hope to a badly in point sector.
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Port of Calais, 6:30 p.m., at the end of April. At the start of the sunny evening, the Botnia Seaways, a cargo ship that has just arrived from Sheerness (United Kingdom), at the mouth of the Thames, is emptying its hundred twelve truck trailers, which go Be parked among dozens of others in the surrounding parking lots. Suddenly, preceded by a powerful whistle, the imposing silhouette of a locomotive appears, an incongruous machine in this road universe. It draws a convoy of around thirty trailers, or 2,000 tonnes in motion, swallowing heavy goods vehicles to the rank of vans.
The scene takes place at the Calais multimodal rail-route terminal, managed by VIIA, a subsidiary of the SNCF, which intends to make it the symbol of a revival of rail freight, at the beginning of the 2020s. of a mode of transport for years by the mass, constantly growing, heavy goods vehicles.
Major sign of this thrill, FRET SNCF, the historic activity of transport of goods from the national company, was financially balanced in 2021. The sick branch of the railway, structurally losing speed for years, is today in green. This is a first since we count apart this activity in the SNCF group. And, paradoxically, it was the Covid crisis that put freight on the rails. In the panic of the first confinement, while road transport was not always there, the rail did the job.
“The period was the start of the rebound for rail freight, confirms Frédéric Delorme, president of Rail Logistics Europe, the rail transport entity of SNCF, which includes Fret SNCF. been honored in the spring of 2020 and our customers were grateful to the work that was accomplished. “So the whole sector is taking a dream to finally shake up the truck market shares. Freight can reverse history by achieving the objective that Jean-Pierre Farandou, the CEO of the SNCF, summed up in its program” iron against carbon “, to pass the rail freight from 9 % of the transport of goods today at 18 % in ten years.
a long descent into hell 2>
The challenge is immense. Because the history of rail freight is first of all the chronicle of a great downgrading. Less than forty years ago, a third of the goods transited by train and the enrollment of freight reached 50,000 railway workers. Today, 4,800 people are attached to SNCF freight. The introduction of competition, in 2005, did not invert the trend, and rather accelerated the deconfitation of the old monopoly. The Litania of the Grandes Grèves Cheminotes (1995, 2001, 2007, 2014, 2018, 2019) has given the train each year, these companies that send the goods.
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