Futuristic multimodal business model for European freight railways: A survival and revival strategy

Abstract European freight rail though environmentally favorable and economic over long distances has still low market share. This is due to its failure to deliver key customer requirements: reliability, quality of service, a door-to-door service and price/cost. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the status of rail freight and to suggest innovative IT based solutions which support the achievement of European Commission objectives on modal shift to revive and increase the rail market share i.e. bringing 30% of road traffic beyond 300 Kms to multimodal transport modes. It does so by drawing lessons from electronic trading in power exchanges to present a multimodal transport exchange. Method The paper first depicts the key strategic issues of European freight railway market using the porter’s five forces analysis at a high level. It then discusses why lessons can be drawn from power exchanges and why the model is from today’s perspective futuristic. Results The important strategic and organizational aspects of power exchanges applicable to the multimodal transport exchanges with relevant modification. The description of the model includes the expected market behavior due to the introduction of such exchanges, a basis for future research. Conclusions The paper fosters the idea, that a multimodal transport exchange model using criteria’s of environment friendliness and economical transport for transport selection can help in the revival and survival of rail. Especially when road traffic is aggregated using automatic algorithms and transported on rail. This will increase the rail market share and also reduce emissions.This paper was presented on 16. July 2015 by the author at RailNewcastle Conference 2015 , Rail Education Group, NewRail - Newcastle Centre for Railway Research Stephenson Building, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom, Program available at https://conferences.ncl.ac.uk/railnewcastleconference/news/RailNewcastle%20conference%202015%20and%20Railway%20Talents%20programme%20final.pdf Information on related research articles for those interested can be located at https://www.ajps.info/research It serves as the basis for the following papers and PhD that the author pursued in the following years