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Open-access boosts freight traffic: the rapidly changing railfreight scene in the Netherlands, where the number of open access operators continues to grow, seems to be boosting rail traffic overall.

Article Excerpt
DESPITE an economic recession, railfreight operators in the Netherlands recorded a 7.5% increase in tonnes in 2003 to 29.8 million, and an impressive 18% jump in tonne-km to 5.2 billion, according to the Transport Ministry. Reflecting the growing importance of rail-freight, ProRail, the national infrastructure manager, recently started to give equal priority to passenger and freight trains.

Railion Netherlands has about a 70% share of the Dutch railfreight market. It was formed in 1999 when German Rail (DB) took over NS Cargo. It is gradually increasing its volumes--it carried 27 million tonnes in 2004 compared with 25.9 million tonnes in 2003--but it is only making a small profit. Railion's present policy is to obtain more capacity but also to re-evaluate its own products. It will therefore discard low-volume routes which may become targets for private operators. It recently withdrew wagonload services from seven provincial centres and is now only interested in wagonload traffic from larger centres such as Rotterdam, Amsterdam/ IJmond, and Vlissingen/Terneuzen.

Railion has grown in traditional rail-freight sectors such as coal and steel. It saw a massive growth in coal traffic when Germany stopped subsidising its mines and industry there found it cheaper to import coal. Railion also achieved growth with the transport of ore (and grain until the EU export restrictions of 2003) but it admits that it should be doing better in the chemicals sector. Other large volumes include traffic for paper and automobile industries. However, Railion is continuing to lose market-share in container traffic.

Railion Netherlands...