Railmen all at sea
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BRIAN STONE, head of market research at Intercontainer, the international railway combined transport organisation, told the Transmode conference that the already high proportion of rail-carried maritime containers will increase.
Stephen Howard, Freightliner's chief development officer, stressed the need for combined transport operators of all kinds to "watch and match" road haulage, though he accepted that large bodies like railways found it difficult to be as flexible as road haulage.
He emphasised the need for trust between road and rail, pointing out that Freightliner was a member of the Road Haulage Association.
Michael Frybourg, director of the French Institute for Transport Research, said that at present 40 per cent of the total European road/rail combined transport was carried out in France.
Novatrans buys wholesale the services of the railways and sells them retail. The haulier need not deal with the railways direct.
The company operates 90 ter mina's in France, and 20 more in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany and Spain. There has been a rapid move towards the use of swop bodies, from almost nothing in 1975 to 35 per cent of current traffic.
On the other hand, Mr W Gerlach, chairman of a Dutch freight forwarding firm, said he accepted that hauliers has started combined transport, but thought that since then the mutual suspicion had grown. He instanced one case where a piggyback service between the Netherlands and Spain had become uneconomic overnight because one of the participating railways had raised its charges by 20 per cent. This meant that he had had to scrap three specially-designed trailers which had only made two trips each.
Two researchers from Newcastle University, Corinne Mulley and Julie Whittaker, described a study they are carrying out for 10 East and South Coast British ports between Aberdeen and Poole, into the economic viability of a coastal semi-trailer ro-ro ferry service (CM, May 1).
They said that they had not reached any definite conclusions, but that more of the potential cargo was time-sensitive than they had expected. This seemed to rule out a service calling at all 10 ports on one trip.