Castex reveals the first steps of the plan of recovery of rail freight - The Point

63 million euros in 2020, then again to 63 million by 2021. Travelers on the construction of combined transport of Bonneuil-sur-Marne, Jean Castex, has announce

Castex reveals the first steps of the plan of recovery of rail freight - The Point

63 million euros in 2020, then again to 63 million by 2021. Travelers on the construction of combined transport of Bonneuil-sur-Marne, Jean Castex, has announced the first measures of the plan of recovery of rail freight. The State plans to develop highways and railways and intends to relaunch the train novelties, Perpignan-Rungis. Tolls for freight trains should also be made free of charge.

Read also Coronavirus : kick brake cargo

" there are tolls, to borrow the furrows (...) that the freight trains travel with passenger trains, so we decided to be free of charge tolls until the end of the year 2020 and a division by two, it is an effort that is quite significant, in 2021, the price of these tolls ", stated to the press, the Prime minister. "It is an incredibly strong signal that the government gives, and this is a first step in what I would call the plan of reconquest of the railway ", he added.

20 000 heavy vehicles and less in 2021 ?

Thanks to these incentives, the State hopes to see 20 000 heavy vehicles on the roads by 2021, corresponding to 425 000 tonnes of CO2 emitted in the least. The government has also the " firm intention of re-opening and developing rail motorways ", said Jean Castex. Calls for projects will be launched by the end of the year for the lines to Bayonne, Cherbourg, Sète-Calais and Perpignan-Rungis, that the State would like to see extended from Antwerp to Barcelona.

Read also Coronavirus : Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, logistician of the government

" You have before you a Prime minister who has been bruised by the case of the Perpignan-Rungis, le train des primeurs ", suspended for a year, said Jean Castex, member of a municipal council in Prades (Pyrénées-Orientales). Until July 2019, the " train early ", formed of the wagons, refrigerated, transported each night the fruits and vegetables produced in the Pyrénées-Orientales to the market of Rungis. The line had to be re-launched end of 2019 to the multimodal platform in Valenton (Val-de-Marne), rather than to Rungis, where the station needs to be modernised, but the customers are not rushed.

Expand the combined rail-road transport

Jean Castex, who was accompanied by the CEO of the SNCF, Jean-Pierre Farandou, and ministers Emmanuelle Wargon (Housing), Barbara Pompili (ecological Transition) and Jean-Baptiste Djebbari (Transport), has also said they want to expand the combined rail-road transport, because " it is the future ". "It is also necessary to restructure the management of rail freight, improve its competitiveness ", he said without elaborating.

Read also Infrastructure : "priority should be given to maintenance rather than new projects,"

One of the challenges is the modernisation of the rail network, in which the government spends "several billion euros per year until 2022," according to Jean-Baptiste Djebbari. In this context, Ivan Stempezynski, president of the groupement national combined transport, has asked Jean Castex to give SNCF Network, manager of the lanes, the means of its ambitions.

Date Of Update: 27 July 2020, 13:33
NEXT NEWS