“This is an incredibly strong signal that the government gives,” said the Prime minister, referring to a “plan of reconquest of the railway”.
“This 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” : Jean Castex unveiled on Monday the first sketches of its plan to relaunch the railway freight, during a trip on the construction of combined transport of Bonneuil-sur-Marne, in the Val-de-Marne.
The State intends to develop rail motorways, by boosting in particular the train novelties, Perpignan-Rungis, and make it free tolls for freight trains, announced this Monday the Prime minister. “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 the tolls”, he told the press.
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“This 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”, said Jean Castex, Matignon recalling that this plan represents 63 million euro in 2020 and even to 63 million by 2021.
“rail Motorways”
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 less. The government has also the “firm intention of re-opening and developing rail motorways”, said Jean Castex.
Of the 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. “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, in the Pyrénées-Orientales.
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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 in the Val-de-Marne, rather than to Rungis, where the station needs to be modernised, but the customers are not rushed.
“The future” of combined road-rail 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 indicated a wish to develop combined road-rail transport, because “it is the future”.
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“It is also necessary to restructure the management of rail freight, improve its competitiveness”, he said without more precision. 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 Djebarri.
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The SNCF, railway undertaking French public, and its reform
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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.
