UIRR General Assembly Brussels 04/05/11

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Executive Chairman, Rudy Colle said: “Road-rail Combined Transport, and UIRR, closed a productive year which brought our economically and ecologically sustainable system of freight transport back to its growth path. UIRR and its members will continue their efforts to further enhance these services enabling consignors to use more of them, through which Europe will come closer to realising its environmental goals and thus become a better place to live.”

 

2010: The Business Year of Road-Rail Combined Transport

The General Assembly of UIRR, the International Union of Combined Road-Rail Transport Companies, convened today in Brussels to conclude the 2010 business year, the 40th since the founding of the organisation.  UIRR’s annual report and the customary statistics booklet accompanying it were simultaneously published.

The past year saw the return of road-rail Combined Transport’s growth trend following the deepest decline of decades suffered as a consequence of the financial and economic crisis:

  • UIRR companies realised a growth of 8% in 2010, which was balanced equally between unaccompanied and accompanied Combined Transport.  This performance allowed regaining half of the ton-kilometres lost by Combined Transport attributable to the crisis, while it slightly exceeded the long-term average annual growth of this system of freight transport.
  • The relative weight of Combined Transport within rail freight continued to expand in 2010: total rail freight performance – in ton-kilometres – grew by 5% in 2010 (as reported by CER[1]), which was considerably outperformed by Combined Transport bringing the share of these types of loads to over 28% among freight trains, meaning that today one in four freight trains is a CT train.
  • The quality of Combined Transport developed attributable to enhanced tracking and tracing information and terminal services.  The punctuality[2] of domestic CT trains[3] stood between 80-85% on average, whereas the accuracy of border crossing CT trains, which use the rail network of two or more countries, approached 70% leaving considerable room though for CT’s railway subcontractors to improve.

2010 was a landmark transport policy year in Europe as for the first time the fundamental legislation pertaining to the competing road and rail transport modes – the ‘Eurovignette Directive’ and the recast proposal of the ‘First Railway Package’ – simultaneously came onto the table of the European Parliament and Council.  UIRR summarised its positions in two conceptual position papers[4] and several specific written contributions[5] prepared also with an eye to the European Commission’s Transport White Paper published in March 2011.

The decision of CEN to adopt the EN13044 standard in October 2010 ended a decade-long initiative of Combined Transport by enabling the issuance of the ILU-Code (from 1 July 2011) bringing about an efficient and standardised owner codification and marking regime for ILUs[6] used exclusively in European freight transport.  UIRR, having led this process, was named as the administrator of the ILU-Code.

 

 

[1] CER: Community of European Railways
[2] Arrival within 30 minutes of schedule
[3]
Freight trains which complete their journeys on the rail network of one Member State
[4] http://www.uirr.com/en/media-centre/press-releases-and-position-papers/2010.html
[5]
http://www.uirr.com/en/media-centre/press-releases-and-position-papers/2011.html
[6]
Intermodal Loading units: swap-bodies and semi-trailers

Related documents
Press release EN
UIRR Report 2010 DE EN FR
UIRR Statistics 2010 EN
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