Author(s)

J.H.R. van Duin

Abstract

The city of Graz in Austria is a semi large city (237.000 inhabitants) with an historical city centre with many small streets. The delivery of goods is not always without problems, and the predicted increase of freight transport within and around the city, gives reason to believe, that the delivery problems will increase in the near future, For this reason the building of a freight transport centre in the south of Graz was initiated. The goal of this research is to find a rail transport option competitive with truck transport possible for a small amount of goods. In order to meet the punctuality constraints and the localisation of goods during transport possible, it is decided to use fifty boxes for the transport of the goods. These boxes are half as big as a standardised 20 fl container without making compromises in any service quality. Also the actual transport by train has to be as flexible as possible. Therefore the CargoSprinter is chosen for the transport between Wemdorf and the Stations in Graz. This train is made for transport on short distances and can be coupled and uncoupled extremely quickly. The second step is the selection of train stations in Graz, suitable for transport and handling of fifty boxes. The third step consists of the calculation of competitiveness of the proposed transport type, using 32 different price scenarios. In the fourth step, the best price scenarios are tested on the actor preferences, because a transport system an only be successful when the actors support it. This feasibility study has shown that the intermodal transport option is not (yet) supported by the actors and is, therefore, not (yet!) a good transport alternative for unimodal transport.

Keywords