A new facility for combined transport in France will be ready in 2025

Published on 10-02-2023 at 05:18

A new facility for combined transport in Fleury-les-Aubrais, near Orleans, in central France, will be ready by 2025. This facility is expected to boost rail freight coming to and from the HAROPA Ports (Le Havre, Rouen, and Paris) and the rest of France.

The project, according to the French Ministry of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion and the Ministry of Energy Transition, will cost 10,3 million euros. It will be funded by the State together with the Centre-Val de Loire and Normandy regions. Once ready, the facility is expected to move up to 150 containers daily.

As the Ministries pointed out, this facility will replace a former combined transport site in Orleans now dismantled. “The choice of a new site fell on the municipality of Aubrais, whose location makes it possible to supply both national and European freight corridors”, they added. According to French newspaper Ouest-France, the facility will initially be served by two 250-metre-long trains. In a second phase, however, the plan is to deploy 750-metre-long trains as well.

Boosting rail at Le Havre is an ongoing, long-term project

Initiatives to increase the modal share of rail freight between the port of Le Havre and the French hinterland started already in 2020. This is when the renovation of the Serqueux-Gisors rail section, between Le Havre and Paris, started. This project was then completed by March 2021, for a total of 246 million euros, ensuring SNCF with significantly more capacity in the form of 25 extra daily train slots available.

More recently, a new logistics warehouse was inaugurated at the port of Le Havre. Built by Prologis and delivered in mid-January, the facility is expected to increase “HAROPA Port’s attractiveness in logistics real estate”, as HAROPA Ports highlighted. It is equipped with five storage units (6,000 square metres each) as well as an external container storage area. Soon, according to HAROPA Ports, the Normandy Bridge Logistics Park at the port of Le Havre will have 125,000 additional square metres of storage.