Efficient use of European rail freight corridors: current status and potential enablers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rail freight is one of the most important pillars for the decarbonising of the transport system in Europe. To ensure the decarbonisation effect of rail freight, a substantial modal split on rail freight is needed, with the aim of strengthening the competitiveness of rail freight and improving the quality of service on the rail freight corridors (RFCs). With the aim of monitoring and evaluating the development of RFC performance, the Data Envelopment Analysis model (DEA) was applied in this study. The evaluation of efficiency was carried out for eight RFCs in 2020 and 2021 using performance indicators considered with Pearson correlation analysis. The results of the efficiency of the RFCs showed that seven of the studied corridors are not operated efficiently, while the correlation analysis showed a significant dependency between the selected indicators. Nevertheless, the efficiency of the corridors and the overall performance of rail freight can be improved by integrating innovative technologies. Therefore, this study also investigated how digital automatic couplers (DACs) and intelligent video gates (IVGs) affect the efficiency of RFCs. The results show that the inclusion of indicators related to DAC and IVG tasks has a positive impact on improving the efficiency of RFCs.