Swiss oper short-h - bahn-journalisten.ch

Swiss oper
short-h
Alpine railways
As a small, mountainous country
with numerous restrictions on
lorry movements, Switzerland
depends heavily on rail for
domestic freight. Anitra Green
looks at the special concepts
that have emerged to optimise
short-distance railfreight
operations.
THE Co-op group is one of
Switzerland’s largest
supermarket chains, and its
lorries operate over hundreds of
kilometres of the country’s busiest
roads each day delivering goods to its
stores. Now it is investing in its biggest
project ever, for baked goods, which
will increase volumes even more.
But rather than simply inflicting more
trucks on Swiss roads, the Co-op
decided to transfer more freight to rail.
This is being done step by step, and
11 routes had been chosen up to August.
For example, Co-op supplies are being
trucked from its distribution centre at
Wangen to a RailCare hub at Härkingen
taken by rail to another RailCare hub at
Daillens, and then trucked out to stores
from Daillens. On the return trip, pasta
from Pasta Gala is taken by road from
Morges to Daillens, railed to Härkingen
and then trucked to Wangen.
RailCare was set up in 2009 to
provide fast intermodal links on local
railways all over the country. Although
RailCare was taken over by Co-op in
2010, it does not work exclusively for
Co-op but has other customers too. It has
nine hubs and runs several trains a day
24 IRJ October 2012

ators optimise
aul railfreight
covering about 200,000km a year, and
completing a round trip within 24 hours.
The philosophy is to keep the
collection and delivery by road at either
end of the rail trunk haul as short as
possible. Trains run to fixed schedules
at up to 120km/h, carrying up to 26
containers each. “This is not a lot, but
we want to have shorter trains for the
sake of speed,” Mr Philipp Wegmüller,
CEO of RailCare explains.
Huge changes are in the pipeline,
he says, with both new hubs and new
services: “Our objective is only to have
horizontal handling, including 40ft
containers, and to automate all stages of
handling as far as possible.” The latest
innovation, introduced this year, was to
equip the first of 60 refrigerated swapbodies
with a GPS telematics system.
One of RailCare’s clients is Heineken.
The Heineken train, which travels the
length of the country between Domat
and Daillens, uses an innovative new
horizontal loading technique dubbed
ContainerMover 3000, designed by
Innovatrain. “We wanted to develop a
system that would cope with a standard
20ft container as well as swap-bodies
without any adaptation,” says Mr Pieter
van den Bold, managing director of
Innovatrain. The system comprises a
“wagon adaptor” mounted on the lorry;
it is hydraulically operated with
electronic controls, and can transfer a
unit weighing up to 22 tonnes between
lorry and wagon within 3 minutes, even
in extreme winter conditions. All it
requires is a 3m wide stretch of asphalt
beside the railway.
“We built the prototype in May 2011,
and delivered the first 10 units to
RailCare in November,” reports van den
Bold. The system is attracting attention
elsewhere too. “DB Schenker selected
two horizontal handling methods,
including ours, and we demonstrated
it to Volkswagen who were very
impressed,” he says.
“It’s very new; we’ve only had it on
the market since the beginning of this
year, and it’s important to prove it
works well. But the first 10 units have
already done eight months’ hard work
for RailCare, so we’re making progress.”
Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) set up
its own subsidiary company called
Cargo Domizil in 1981 specialising in
intermodal overnight inland freight. It
was taken over in 1996 by a consortium
of three haulage companies - Planzer,
Camion and Galliker - and, following
restructuring and a new location
concept, broke even for the first time
two years later. Now it carries 10,000
consignments a night between 10
locations in Switzerland, with 60%
by rail and 40% by road.
Using Planzer’s logistics expertise,
freight flows can be combined, transit
times reduced, reliability improved,
emissions cut, and full advantage taken
of the Swiss ban on trucks driving at
night. “Nobody at SBB Cargo has any
logistics know-how,” explains
Mr Fridolin Landolt, a Planzer board
member. “But there is still room for
improvement in the availability of rail
infrastructure and locations for hubs,
which have to be in the right place.”
From this year, Planzer is also
masterminding the supply of goods to
Zermatt, where road access is restricted.
The Matterhorn-Gotthard Railway
(MGB) was managing this operation
itself, but realised it was more efficient
to concentrate on running a railway and
to commission an expert partner to look
after the logistics side. Planzer formed a
new company, Alpin Cargo, to deal
with everything except carriage by rail
under an initial five-year contract. “We
have two terminals, one in Visp and one
in Zermatt, and run 38 freight trains a
week,” says Mr Jean-Pierre Wettstein,
another Planzer board member. “From
IRJ October 2012 25
Photo: David Gubler

Alpine railways
ContainerMover 3000 is a system for transferring containers between road and rail vehicles horizontally.
Zermatt there’s another rail link to
Gornergrat. We carry about 85,000
tonnes of goods a year to Zermatt, and
about a quarter is mineral oil. It’s
proving to be a very successful concept.”
At the eastern end of the country in
Graubunden, the narrow-gauge
Rhaetian Railway (RhB) is in a unique
position. The whole of this canton is
mountainous, and sometimes in winter
the only access is by rail. RhB’s freight
arm carries 750,000 tonnes per year
using 460 wagons and serving 37
freight yards. “One of our special
features is that we operate mixed trains
- a Co-op wagon coupled to a passenger
train, for example,” says Mr Mattias
Tscharner, head of freight at RhB.
“Also we have a higher proportion of
intermodal traffic than most. One of our
customers, Aldi, always used road
transport, but when they saw the
mountains, they realised intermodal
was the only way.” In this terrain,
intermodal transport is economical over
surprisingly short distances; the longest
route, from Landquart to Samedan, is
96km and the shortest, from Arosa to
Chur, a mere 26km. “This route is also
the best earner,” smiles Tscharner.
RhB’s intermodal success story
started in 1992 with a working group
studying the possibility of transporting
foodstuffs in swap-bodies, and was
quickly followed by trial runs. A big
leap forward was achieved in 1999 with
the opening of a new handling centre in
Landquart and the Vereina tunnel,
leading to new services for both the
Co-op and the Post Office. In 2000, RhB
opened Europe’s highest intermodal
terminal in Samedan at 1700m.
RhB has increased the flexibility of
its freight operations by running
mixed trains. Photo: Robin Ralston
On the import/export front, SBB
Cargo is planning two major projects
which together will form the gateway
to Switzerland for long-haul intermodal
traffic from all over Europe. Planning
permission for Gateway Limmattal,
near Zurich, is being submitted this
autumn. It will be built on the edge of
an existing marshalling yard and will
serve as the country’s main distribution
centre from 2017. As Mr Daniel Bürgy,
project leader for intermodal traffic at
SBB Cargo, points out “2000 containers
a day arrive in Switzerland from
northern European ports, and this is
expected to triple by 2030.”
In parallel is the development of Basle
Nord tri-modal terminal at Switzerland’s
only port, which will also be the
gateway for northwest Switzerland.
The work will be carried out in two
stages, with road/rail facilities complete
by 2015 and the tri-modal installations,
including a new basin for barge traffic,
opening three years later.
There are still problems, however.
One question raised time and again is
the absolute priority given to passenger
trains on Switzerland’s densely-used
network. As Wettstein points out with
regard to Alpin Cargo: “About 80% of
Zermatt’s revenue comes from tourists,
so priority for passenger trains is
important. But we need another
approach.” This view is expressed by
many involved in the railfreight sector
who resent having to delay a long-haul
freight train for a frequent urban
service. Another question is whether it
makes sense to integrate domestic
intermodal traffic with wagonload
freight, as several experts have
suggested. Only time will tell whether
such views are realistic and translate
into action in favour of railfreight. IRJ
26 IRJ October 2012