Cleaner winged shoes
More than 1 million consignments a year by rail. Hermes Germany recently transported cross-border consignments by rail for the first time. The company aims to shift 1.3 million consignments a year on a 625 km route between Magdeburg, 130 km west of Berlin, and Łódz, 130 km west of Warsaw.
Hermes Germany is well-positioned in the city logistics segment, having already created blueprints for emission-free deliveries in inner cities – including in Berlin, Magdeburg, Mainz and Hamburg. On longer hauls emission-free solutions aren’t available in all of the firm’s network for parcels yet.
“We’ll continue to keep a strong focus on developing this field in future too,” Andreas Schuchardt, Hermes Germany’s divisional manager for transport and operations management, underlined. Since 1 July a pilot project conducted with DB Cargo has been assessing the potential to scale the option up.
The transports in the pilot project are carried out with swap bodies once a week in each direction. Hermes Germany sustainability manager Michael Peuker is pleased that “we’ve booked the eco-power option ‘DBeco plus’ through DB Cargo on the German side, enabling us to save around 57 t of CO2 a year on the tour, which is more than 50% less than deploying lorries. We haven’t been able to realise this progress on the Polish side yet. We use DB Cargo’s ‘DBeco neutral’ there, enabling us to compensate another 47 t of CO2.”
Further domestic German rail transport options are being assessed – with transit time requirements one criterion, for example. The experience gathered in the ongoing pilot projects is important for any extension of the corporation’s rail transport solutions, Hermes said. Over and above this the company “is also banking on e-lorries and on hydrogen trucks when it comes to creating various low-emission alternatives on longer routes,” Schuchardt closed.