TNT has expanded its transalpine rail services between Northern Europe and Italy and is planning tointroduce more ‘rail express’ products next year.
After launching a daily intermodal service between its main European road hub at Arnhem,Netherlands, and its largest Italian hub at Piacenza earlier this year, TNT Express Italy has addeda second transalpine service to Milan.
The new service departs Arnhem on Fridays and arrives in Milan on Sunday mornings, TNTExpress Italy announced. This enables it to use the weekend to transport goods and thus offer ‘day-definite delivery’ in Italy. The initial intermodal service has a 95% on-time arrivalperformance, it pointed out.
Both intermodal services combine long-distance transportation by rail with localtransportation by road. TNT is using the “rolling highway” service of RAlpin AG, which transportsfully-loaded trucks, between Freiburg (Germany) and Novara (Italy). This cuts the road transportleg of the journey from 36 to 14 hours, and reduces the CO2 impact by at least three tonnes perweek. About 20% of TNT’s international shipments from Arnhem to Italy now come by intermodal means.
TNT Express already has further plans to expand its intermodal transportation in Europe nextyear. An international service from Brussels to Milan is scheduled in early 2010, also incooperation with RAlpin AG, and there are plans for a Milan-UK service. The express operator isalso looking into routes from Benelux to Spain and Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, TNT Express France managing director Eric Jacquemet has reiterated the company’ssupport for the Carex European high-speed rail freight project at a discussion event on December11. Carex is one of the company’s sustainability projects and will be a major lever to reduce CO2emissions, he declared.
The Euro-Carex project aims to create a network of high-speed freight trains operatingbetween Paris Charles de Gaulle airport and other major European airports, initially includingLyon, Lille, Liege (TNT’s air hub), Amsterdam, Cologne and London. Other airports would be addedlater. The French government has pledged €170 million investment in rail freight terminals at Parisand Lyon airports, SNCF plans to create an operating subsidiary to run the services and a usergroup has been set up to handle joint orders of rolling stock. However, the cost of thespecially-constructed trains appears to have put back the original launch date of 2012.
