Environmentally friendly freight transport: Parcels on the rails – car & mobile

How can parcels be transported without polluting the environment too much? The parcel industry is now back on the rails. After the market leader Deutsche Post DHL increased its use of freight trains last year, its competitor DPD also recently started a project. Freight trains are on the move between Duisburg and Hamburg, one in each direction and night. The amount of parcels is initially small, only two containers from DPD are transported on the trains, the other containers (technical term: swap bodies) on the train are from other companies, for example freight forwarders.

In three months, however, DPD wants to expand the project and add more routes. By the end of 2023, five percent of national DPD freight traffic should go by rail, according to DPD manager Anke Förster, who is responsible for network planning. However, the idea itself is not new: Until well into the second half of the 20th century, parcels were mostly transported by rail over long distances; Letters were also transported by rail for many decades, sometimes on special mail trains in which postal workers sorted the items during the journey. In the course of the postal reform after reunification and with the construction of large, highly automated sorting centers on the outskirts of the cities, the transport of mail was completely switched to trucks at the end of the 1990s. The railway mail trains disappeared from the tracks; In the traffic center of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, a railway mail car from 1933 is a reminder of this time.

In the meantime, however, the Post and its competitors are realizing how important climate-friendly transport is – especially since the volume of shipments is constantly increasing. In 2021, the industry association BIEK recorded growth of just over eleven percent to 4.5 billion shipments, which means that 15 million parcels and packages were delivered every day. The association predicts that the volume could increase to around 5.7 billion shipments by 2026. No wonder, then, that some in the industry are (re)discovering the environmentally friendly transport of goods by rail.

According to its own information, the market leader Deutsche Post DHL, for example, currently uses between 50 and 70 freight trains every week for parcel transport in Germany on several routes. In the past year, the group increased the proportion of parcels that are transported by rail on the so-called main leg – i.e. in transport between the large sorting centers – from two to six percent. In the future, it should even be 20 percent, according to the post office – assuming the framework conditions improve. “For example, we need faster wagons again for light freight transport, better availability of train paths through infrastructure expansion and simplified procedures for building or upgrading rail connections and loading terminals,” explains Swiss Post. Most recently, many rail freight operators had repeatedly complained about massive disruptions in the Deutsche Bahn rail network.

A container from Deutsche Post DHL is lifted from a truck onto a Deutsche Bahn wagon at a loading station in Großbeeren in Brandenburg.

(Photo: Patrick Pleul/dpa)

Industry experts see the inclusion of rail in parcel transport as positive. “This is a relevant building block for reducing CO2 emissions,” says Kai-Oliver Schocke from the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences. However, the proportion of parcels by rail should not be too high, says the logistics professor. On the one hand, many depots are so far away from rail loading points that rail transport is not worthwhile – delivery and collection would take too long and there would be no benefit in terms of climate protection if the truck route from the rails to the depot was long. Ultimately, Deutsche Bahn was asked to expand the network of freight train routes.

Hermes is still holding back

The logistics company Hermes does not send parcels on freight trains. There are “only a few offers on the rails that meet our needs,” says a company spokeswoman. Viewed across the entire process chain, rail transport is much more expensive than truck transport. In addition, it is “contrary to what customers want” that the transit times on the rails are longer. However, the spokeswoman also says that the environmental advantage of rail is “clear” – in principle one is open to the subject.

In fact, there are always problems in practice: the first freight train with DPD containers on board left Hamburg an hour late. And the next day, the containers were ready for collection in Duisburg an hour and a half later than planned. DPD manager Förster says that using rail is logistically much more complex. “Trucks normally drive from one depot to another depot via the motorway, and they can be flexibly rescheduled.” With rail transport, however, trucks drive in the evening from the depot to the loading station, where the containers are heaved onto the trains. In the morning, other trucks pick up the containers at the destination station and drive them to another depot. Reliability is very important here, says Förster. If the freight train arrives late, it puts a lot of pressure on the delivery logistics.

With material from dpa.

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