Kombiverkehr: Mega disaster on the Italian routes
Due to the current situation in traffic between Germany and Italy via the Gotthard and Brenner route, Kombiverkehr KG (Frankfurt am Main) demand for EUR 250 million of emergency aid from the German government for freight forwarders and companies involved in the transport chain.
For a period of several weeks, both routes have been severely affected by accidents, construction sites or border controls like never before. As a result, operators had difficulties in offering predictable, regular transport services for in combined road-rail transport, the company complains in a press release. In the following they stressed on the fact that “particularly medium-sized forwarding and logistics companies, who have shifted their transports to rail, are suffering from the financial consequences on a daily basis.”
According to Kombiverkehr, shippers are forcing their forwarding agents more and more to carry out the transports mainly on the road due to the road ban at Rastatt, which is hardly possible with own truck fleets specifically designated for combined transport. Whether the operators can offer their previously offered services again in a similar way once the Rheintal route is resumed, is more than questionable today.
The required emergency aid is intended to benefit all the freight forwarders, traction companies, terminal operators and operators, to enable them to offer their services continuously, and to avoid that the commitment and previous investments into the environmentally friendly combined transport are not ruined at once. “The current situation in rail freight traffic to and from Italy can only be described as ‘mega disaster’”, reads the press release.
As Europe’s biggest operator, Kombiverkehr transports more than 350,000 truck shipments per year through the Gotthard and Brenner routes to and from Italy. The current customer circle in Italy includes more than 270 freight forwarding and logistics companies, which save over 400,000 tonnes of harmful carbon dioxide annually through their transports by rail.