In terms of transport policy, one of the current European strategies is aimed at rendering efficient the transport of goods on railways, but also at increasing its share in the logistics chain. Railway transport can be the universal answer to a question concerning the growth of trade in the worldwide economy.
It has become a fact lately that both railway associations and railway transport operators have been struggling to improve their freight transport services on rails so that they could be perfectly tailored to the requirements imposed by the customers of the supply chains.
To achieve this goal, experts from the associations mentioned above believe the sector needs modular design freight trains to meet the latest market requirements, trains manufactured at optimal length, the development and implementation of appropriate goods handling and transhipment techniques in freight terminals and, last but not least, the consolidation of interfaces with other transport modes of the logistics chain.
In what concerns the efficiency of the relationship between rail freight transport operators and logistics services integrators, one of the largest company specialized in the area, Kuehne + Nagel, declared that “first of all, railway operators have to understand that logistics providers are their partners with a high interest in including rail services into their portfolio. Logistics providers can be a helpful link to customers/industries which are not traditionally bonded to rail services; for example the FMCG sector provides a huge potential”. Kuehne + Nagel expects that rail freight transport will become more important in the future due to the growing demand for environment friendly green logistics solutions. As a logistics provider, the company offers national and pan-European rail logistics solutions which include wagon group, block-train and intermodal systems in collaboration with state-owned or private European rail operators. All transport flows (including rail, handling and warehousing as well as distribution activities) are monitored by their own tracking and tracing systems and connected to their integrated logistics solutions ranging from sea and airfreight to road logistics.
ICT systems help
For a better integration of the services provided to customers, but also for the efficiency of the logistics chain, rail freight transport operators call on ICT solutions.
“With the help of ICT systems, Rail Cargo Hungary assures comprehensive data service in case of special transport. The information services and the relating logistics systems are applied as information resources for own informatics- and process-register. The system provides possibility for special planning for railway transport beside public road transport, which saves additional costs and make the processes and the logistics more efficient. Connecting the system with water-bone transport could create the interoperability among the different modal sectors”, the representatives of Rail Cargo Hungary say.
Likewise for intermodal traffic, adopting information technology should allow consignment information to be made more accurate and complete and allow it to be exchanged faster. “Rather than dream of a multi-modal transport document, we could postulate a single data file containing all the general information about the consignment and prepared by the customer. This data source could then be used by the various carriers to create the transport document appropriate to each mode. In the longer term, a proper international convention for multimodal transport must be agreed to make real progress in the development of intermodality”, explained the representatives of the International Rail Transport Committee (CIT), underlining the importance of the information technology in reshaping the logistics chain while taking into account railway transport.
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