Trans-Siberian Railway © DiegoFiore Dreamstime.com
By Alexander Whitman 01/07/2024
Global rail freight has been a mixed blessing for European rail operators over the year, with the latest Dutch figures offering a grim contrast to their Russian counterparts.
By mid-2024, Statistics Netherlands announced that the previous year had not been ideal for the country’s rail freight, recording a 12.5% year-on-year drop in volume, with just over 39.3 million tonnes of goods transported in the 12-month period.
Container volumes fell 11.5% year-on-year, losing more than 2 million tonnes, from just under 20 million tonnes in 2022 to 17.3 million tonnes last year, with CBS noting that the country has struggled particularly when it comes to exports.
Industry sources said much of the decline could be attributed to the continued normalisation process post-Covid-19, but the disappointing figures coincided with a difficult period for European rail freight as it looks to sell itself as a green alternative to trucking.
Over the past year, sources have made the case that rail and boat offer one of the quickest and easiest ways to shift from carbon-fueled road fleets – with others emphasizing that given the global shortage of truck drivers, this should be an easy win.
But there are signs that the government is resisting replacing rail freight with road freight: Angela Merkel’s former party, the Christian Democrats, has declared that roads will remain the main means of transporting goods in Germany.
A pro-rail and pro-boat source told The Lodestar that governments needed to move more towards alternative modes, but stressed that the messaging needed to be clear that there was no agenda to remove road transport – “road will be central to the last mile”.
But Europe’s conflicts are not repeated in Russia, where railways are a key lifeline amid Western sanctions and its efforts to build a healthy war economy, with volumes to and from China up 20% in the first five months of 2024.
Russian Railways reported a year-on-year increase last week, with Railfreight.com reporting volumes at 16.8 million tonnes, of which 15.6 million tonnes were Russian exports to China, while only 1.2 million tonnes were imports from China.
Despite these positive figures, precise details about the composition of these volumes were not sufficiently available, although press coverage indicated that much of the outflow from Russia consisted of coal exports.
Meanwhile, the Polish government appeared to be opening the door for Ukrainian rail freight companies to return to Europe by granting Ukrainian Railways a license to operate within Poland.
