| Summary: | In Sweden plans to build high speed railways have been around since the early 1990s and the plans have developed to be more precised since. The future Swedish high-speed rail network is supposed to consist of two lines. Götalandsbanan; from Stockholm to Gothenburg, and Europabanan from Jönköping through the Öresund Region to Hamburg. The description of the aim to build high-speed railways in Sweden has in former reports always been to achieve rapid passenger traffic between big Scandinavian cities and Europe. There are almost nothing mentioned about the possibilities of high-speed transports of cargo on these railways. This study aims to clarify the freight transport market for Götalandsbanan and Europabanan. Today there is only one transport system with high-speed freight trains. It is the French Post, La Poste, trains for letter and parcel transportation. A more comprehensive system, called Euro Carex, is at the planning stage in Europe. The plan is to set up cargo terminals at some of Europe's largest cargo airports where transshipments between flight and rail can be made. Today train transport has a strong position in the bulk and base market. A transport system with high-speed freight trains attracts an entirely different type of cargo. There are two distinctive characteristics that make the goods possible to transport with high-speed trains. These are: High value Requirements for short transport time Such goods are for instance freight today transported by air freight over medium distances and truck transportations where the journey time is not satisfactory and where air freight is too costly. Products fulfilling those characteristics are for example, letters, packages, newspapers, flowers, special mechanical components and medical equipment. The key to be able to establish a transport system is the amount of goods that would be possible to transport with high-speed trains. In the current situation road haulage has the absolute majority of the transport market of highly processed goods with high value products. Air cargo accounts for only a tiny part, which is almost negligible in comparison with other transport modes. The service market in which letters and packages are included is however an expanding market, which means that freight volumes are likely to increase over time. In this study an analysis of the freight customers' preferences has been done as well as a circulation analysis for the train traffic, a cost analysis and a distance and travel time analysis. Realistic timetables for each train set have been created to serve as input for the cost analysis. The created timetables consist of traffic in following relationships: Stockholm – Gothenburg Stockholm –Malmoe– Copenhagen Stockholm –Copenhagen– Hamburg 8 Two different scenarios have been developed in order to cover for uncertainty of the market size. One scenario with high vehicle utilization rate and another with less. The cost analysis for high-speed freight train traffic is made with a cost model developed for Gröna tåget by Oskar Fröidh. Four traffic models have been analyzed with varied parameter values. The traffic model characteristics and the cost analysis results are seen in the table below. Traffic Model Train Size Utilization Rate Train Traffic Cost (SEK/tonne-km) Total Cost incl. Terminal Costs (SEK/tonne-km) 1 Small, six railcars Low, scenario 1 1,30 2,30 2 Small, six railcars High, scenario 2 1,20 1,96 3 Large, eight railcars Low, scenario 1 1,27 2,02 4 Large, eight railcars High, scenario 2 1,16 1,73 Table: The characteristics of the four analyzed traffic models and the resulting costs. Interviews have been done with companies that can be interested in using such a transport system on order to investigate the size of the market for a Swedish transport system with high-speed freight trains. Seven companies have been contacted of which four have responded. The amount of goods that could be transferred to high-speed freight train if such a system existed today is about 8 400 tonnes per year. The amount corresponds to the identified goods that for sure would have been transferred. Cargo volumes for the different relations can be seen in the table below. Relation Godsmängd (ton/år) Stockholm - Göteborg 2 900 Stockholm - Malmö 5 500 Table: Identified freight volume possible to transport with high-speed freight trains. If the costs should be as calculated in the cost analysis a transport system with high-speed freight trains would require market of 196 000 tonnes of freight per year. A transport system consisting of only one train would require a market of about a third, which is approximately 65 000 tonnes. With such traffic pattern the cost would be significantly higher for transporting goods with high-speed freight trains than the calculated values. From these results the conclusion is that there is not a sufficient market for a transport system with high-speed freight trains in Sweden.
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