The main outcome of the RETRACK project has been a new and innovative trans-European rail freight service concept as an alternative to the national railway’s single wagon system.
In 2007, multiple partners joined forces in the European RTD project RETRACK with the aim of simplifying single wagon transport and offering customers a new cross-border European portfolio with a reliable running schedule. RETRACK intended to develop a sustainable alternative concept to the national railway’s single wagon system. This concept was expected to contribute to a significant modal shift of cargo from road to rail and to create an effective and scalable rail freight corridor between high demand regions in Western Europe and new high growth regions in Central and Eastern Europe. Important issues, tackled in this context were the integration of strategic port hubs (to provide access to the large goods repositories and generating the necessary volumes to make rail freight transport along the corridor economically feasible) and comparable short and guaranteed door-to-door delivery times of shipments. With this new rail freight service concept, the RETRACK partners aimed at demonstrating that rail freight services on trans-European corridors can be a competitive alternative to road haulage.
During the project, a “demonstration train” has been operated enabling the identification and testing of the possibilities and limits for new and innovative transport concepts on selected routes in practice between the hubs Köln-Eifeltor and Györ with a secondary hub established in the Rotterdam region. The RETRACK demonstration train is conceived as a “group of wagons train”, i.e. transport volumes of various customers - usually being smaller than the amount suitable for a block train - are combined into a train set. The volumes have been composed of all kinds of goods – from agricultural products and powdery bulk cargo to semi- finished products from the coal and steel industry, chemical products incl. dangerous goods as well as machine parts and containers. The train was operated by the RETRACK consortium members Central European Railways Rt. (Hungary), LTE Logistik (Austria) and Transpetrol GmbH (Germany), with Transpetrol assuming the role of a neutral train operator and railway undertaking for the German part of the service. In 2011, one year after
the start of the first train with two customers and one departure per week, the service attracted more than 10 customers from various economic sectors and the frequency could be increased to three weekly departures between the hubs Köln-Eifeltor and Györ with train lengths of up to 740m and 2,300 tonnes in each direction. In 2014, after several partners had withdrawn from RETRACK, VTG decided to take control of the project. Since then, the VTG railway undertaking (Bräunert) operates under the name RETRACK. The new company, Retrack GmbH & Co. KG headquartered in Hamburg, is a subsidiary of VTG Rail Logistics. Today, VTG's RETRACK network provides a logistical link between the most important economic centers in Europe, covering Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. The focus is on three main corridors with nodes, feeders and distribution antennas (see Figure). (https://www.vtg.com/news-and-insights/press-releases/detail/vtg-rail-logistics-railway-undertaking-now-called-retrack)
