Swiss oper short-h - bahn-journalisten.ch

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