Mercitalia’s high-speed rail freight service in Italy is no more
The high-speed rail freight service offered by Mercitalia Fast (FS Group), connecting the south of Italy with Bologna, has been canceled. The last train left the Mercitalia terminal in Marcianise, roughly 30 kilometres from Naples, on the evening of 18 November.
FS was quoted by TrasportoEuropa saying that the closure of this service should be temporary, until new commercial evaluations are made. However, the company did not provide more information concerning the cancelation or the future reinstatement of this service.
Members of various Italian workers’ associations, as stated by Il Mattino, claimed that already in 2020, the expectations were that the service would be discontinued. This is because Amazon was the sole customer and there was only one convoy dedicated to this service. Moreover, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic played a role in decreasing demand for this service.
The story of the first Italian high-speed rail freight service
The high-speed rail freight service was launched by Mercitalia Fast four years ago, in November 2018, and was the first high-speed rail freight service in Italy. For this service, goods were traveling on an ETR 500 train, usually used for high-speed passenger transportation, tractioned by E.404 locomotives.
During its first months, the service was quite efficient, by achieving a 96 per cent punctuality, with the remaining 4 per cent delayed by less than half an hour. The train in fact covered over 520 kilometres in less than three and a half hours.
Also read:
- New Italy-China service by Hupac coming soon
- Italy: 198 amendments to the TEN-T network proposal to involve the south
- FS’ maxi-plan to rejuvenate its fleet: 400 new locos and 3,600 new wagons
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Quality, matters! (“JIT”, etc.)
As short of all vitals, at all supply chains: redundancy, resilency and robustness, simply any risk of a risk, adds to costs of clients now relying upon service rendered by railway cargo.
Regrettably infrastructure of railways, devastatingly vulnerable, as stuck at standards since long not optimal, now has turned Bottleneck, simply by not withstanding, neither current traffic, nor speed.
For sake of railways, of all…, bottlenecks of railways have to be outed!