The issues surrounding the functioning of wagonload transport since the 1990s, and especially since the liberalization of the rail freight market in Poland, have been a subject of discussion, particularly regarding the expediency of maintaining this form of transport. This is clearly illustrated by the lack of interest in these services from private freight carriers, alongside complaints from representatives of PKP CARGO SA regarding the significant costs associated with providing this form of transport. The aim of this article is therefore to attempt to outline the situation regarding these services and to point out the necessity of supporting this form of transport, including the presentation of specific proposals for solutions to make this offer more attractive.Wagonload transport concerns the carriage of bulk cargo, but primarily non-bulk cargo, in single wagons or small groups of wagons (also referred to in literature as distributed transport). These are generally carried out between points of dispatch and receipt for which the volume of cargo streams does not justify, from an economic point of view, the implementation of transport in the form of full trainloads. Therefore, from the point of view of transport organization, this form is characterized by greater complexity, both in organizational and technological terms, mainly due to: the probabilistic nature of cargo shipment requests with a diverse structure in terms of type and space, and significant dispersion of points of dispatch and receipt of transported cargo.
The currently functioning system of organizing wagonload transport is based on the system of so-called hub points. In this system, hub points are defined as technical stations, i.e., shunting stations (SM) and marshalling yards (SR), where individual cargo streams are concentrated in a way that creates cargo flows, subsequently allowing them to be moved in the form of full trainloads between technical stations.
Such a transport organization system was introduced on Polish railways in the mid-1990s as a response to decreasing transport volumes and the resulting need to reduce the number of technical stations. The same system has been used on Western European railways since the 1980s.
An important feature of it is the rigid train schedule, especially for trains running between marshalling yards. (…)
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Source: Logistyka Magazine 2/2012