[Series] Recovery plan: a hope for rail freight?
Audio 02:42
An SNCF employee prepares a freight train at Saint-Charles station in Perpignan (illustrative image).
RAYMOND ROIG / AFP
By: Pauline Gleize Follow
9 min
The draft budget for 2021 presented this week by the French government gives pride of place to the recovery plan of 100 billion euros over two years.
On this occasion, throughout the week RFI invites you to shed light on several sectors that will benefit from it. In this third episode, we look at the bedside of the rail.
The government is spending 4.7 billion euros on rail transport.
Objective: "to modernize the most widely used network", to reinvest in small lines and to develop the transport of goods.
On average, only 9% of land goods are transported by the rail network in France compared to 18% in Germany.
How is French rail freight doing?
Can the recovery plan be a game-changer?
Publicity
In the morning, the Le Bourget marshalling yard is rather quiet.
Agents take the opportunity to repair a remote track of the few trains ready to leave.
Alexandre Duclos, head of the Bourget-Bobigny workshop, emphasizes that despite the early appearances, the station is still active.
Currently, around "
200 wagons per day, but we have a capacity five to six times greater
"
are sorted
.
The
Covid-19 epidemic has lowered the number of departures, but that does not explain everything.
Le Bourget yard has lost activity in recent years.
"
In 2007 or 2009, we should have been on
1,000,
1,200 wagons
."
But Alexandre Duclos remains confident.
“
We are in a very interesting geographical position since with this star system we can serve all of French rail activity, so we can adapt
”.
Adaptability is also the watchword of the workshop manager who ensures that 90% of the routes are usable.
From a union source, this is far from the case in Somain in the north
from France.
"
From 600 to 60 railway workers
"
On a bridge that spans this yard
,
Willy Dans, elected to the CSE of Fret SNCF,
observe the vegetation which takes its ease and remembers the prosperous days of the site of this railway town.
"
It was nickel-chrome, and then there was the atmosphere, a solidarity
", he remembers above the almost deserted tracks.
"
In 2007, there were 600 railway workers on the site, and as the various restructuring plans progress, we have about sixty left
."
A decline in numbers with the decline of the single wagon.
In against-low, near the Post Office B,
C
hristophe Bellows, also elected South Rail, still working on the site and deplores worsening working conditions.
“
We had to set up a warning fee to have the yard weeded.
We are coming to this,
”he exclaims exasperatedly.
“
40% of the yard is condemned, closed.
There, we have a needle, we cannot change it.
We have been waiting for four months
”.
The railway workers "
have to do army corps maneuvers because we don't have this needle,
" testifies the union representative.
"We have the right to be skeptical"
Faced with this observation, Christophe Soufflet and Willy Dans doubt that the recovery plan is sufficient to revitalize the sorting of Somain.
"
We remain skeptical, we have undergone too much restructuring, we have had too many beautiful promises from successive governments and at the end of the day, we realize that we are in a situation where we are almost in bankruptcy
",
assures Willy In who hopes to be wrong.
Skepticism also dominates in the local CGT.
“
At the same time, SNCF continues to cut freight jobs.
We have the right to be skeptical
”, is surprised
David Rotolo,
general secretary of the CGT railway workers union in Somain.
Fret SNCF separates, in fact, from 100 drivers.
A decision dictated by the 15 to 20% drop in activity since the Covid-19 pandemic, explains Jérôme Leborgne, the general manager of Fret SNCF.
And to promise flexibility:
"These drivers will go on the passenger network, there may be transfers in the other direction when there are needs."
And then, "
the SNCF trains around 700 drivers every year
".
In the meantime, David Rotolo would like a strategy to be presented.
“
We don't know where they are going to invest
”.
However, it requires a long-term policy.
“
The management told us that we could not re-sort as we did yesterday.
We agree.
But, we have to invent, innovate, invest and here we are far from it
”.
Seated at a good distance, one of his colleagues, Raymond Urbanek
,
believes that it will also be necessary to put in the means to reform railway workers if the isolated wagon, today much more expensive than the truck, is relaunched.
According to the management of Fret SNCF,
the
part of the plan devoted to freight transport is "
of the order of one billion euros
".
For David Rotolo,
that will be far from sufficient.
An opinion partially shared by Alain Bruneel, Communist deputy
of the North: "
On all the work that there is to do
", the envelope of the recovery plan, "
it is not huge, it will take a lot more than that.
But we are already saying
: "we are putting the rails back on track, we are relaunching the idea of this rail freight motorway".
And for this rail motorway, we are well placed, we are at the European crossroads.
We have all the assets here,
”believes the one who pleads with the government and the railway authorities for the Somain freight site
.
“
We are a crossroads in terms of traffic and we are an economic crossroads.
Somain's marshalling yard must be reborn from its ashes
”.
"An alignment of the planets"
Alain Bruneel hopes that this would give a boost to the local economy.
“
A strategy must be discussed in December,
” he explains.
For the moment, he has no assurance that the Somain triage will be among the priorities.
At the national level, Jérôme Leborgne underlines that the company's activity will depend on the recovery of the economy, but still hopes that the rate of rail transport will double by 2030. The Managing Director of Fret SNCF feels “
a real desire to energize the sector
”
.
With the Green deal, the European plan for ecological transition, the citizens' convention for the climate which pushes for fewer trucks and more river and rail,
he thinks there is
"
An alignment of the planets totally favorable to rail freight
".
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