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.
rators optimise haul 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
IRJ October 2012
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 swap- bodies 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
“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
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Photo: David Gubler
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