High speed rail project gets first financial pledge
Euro Carex (Cargo Rail Express) - a project to create a pan-European high speed rail service for express and air cargo currently handled by truck and short and mid-haul flights – has taken an important step forward with governments in three European countries, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, pledging funding totalling more than E90m towards the construction of terminals at Paris Roissy-CDG, Liège and Amsterdam Schiphol airports.
“This will silence the critics of the project who said that while good on paper it would struggle to secure financing,” says Yanick Paternotte, president of Roissy Carex, which brings together major cargo players at the Paris hub such as Air France, FedEx, TNT, UPS, La Poste and WFS, the Paris airports authority(AdP) as well as public authority agencies.
The first Euro Carex trains are earmarked to operate from end-March 2012 but funding has yet to be found for an initial investment in rolling stock estimated at around E200m, on the basis of eight trains (with a unit cost of E25m) and each carrying between 100-150 tonnes of palletised cargo.
...Read more on this in this week’s issue of IFW.
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