Marknadsanalys av ett svenskt transportsystem med höghastighetsgodståg.
In Sweden plans to build high speed railways have been around since the early 1990s and the planshave developed to be more precised since. The future Swedish high-speed rail network is supposedto consist of two lines. Götalandsbanan; from Stockholm to Gothenburg, and Europabanan fromJönköping through the Öresund Region to Hamburg.The description of the aim to build high-speed railways in Sweden has in former reports always beento achieve rapid passenger traffic between big Scandinavian cities and Europe. There are almostnothing mentioned about the possibilities of high-speed transports of cargo on these railways. Thisstudy 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, LaPoste, trains for letter and parcel transportation. A more comprehensive system, called Euro Carex, isat the planning stage in Europe. The plan is to set up cargo terminals at some of Europe's largestcargo 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 withhigh-speed freight trains attracts an entirely different type of cargo. There are two distinctive characteristicsthat make the goods possible to transport with high-speed trains. These are:High valueRequirements for short transport timeSuch goods are for instance freight today transported by air freight over medium distances and trucktransportations where the journey time is not satisfactory and where air freight is too costly. Productsfulfilling those characteristics are for example, letters, packages, newspapers, flowers, specialmechanical components and medical equipment.The key to be able to establish a transport system is the amount of goods that would be possible totransport with high-speed trains. In the current situation road haulage has the absolute majority ofthe transport market of highly processed goods with high value products. Air cargo accounts for onlya tiny part, which is almost negligible in comparison with other transport modes. The service marketin which letters and packages are included is however an expanding market, which means thatfreight volumes are likely to increase over time.In this study an analysis of the freight customers' preferences has been done as well as a circulationanalysis 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. Thecreated timetables consist of traffic in following relationships:Stockholm?GothenburgStockholm?Malmoe?CopenhagenStockholm?Copenhagen?Hamburg8Two 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 Grönatåget by Oskar Fröidh. Four traffic models have been analyzed with varied parameter values. Thetraffic model characteristics and the cost analysis results are seen in the table below.TrafficModelTrain Size Utilization RateTrain Traffic Cost(SEK/tonne-km)Total Cost incl.Terminal Costs(SEK/tonne-km)1Small, six railcars Low, scenario 1 1,30 2,302Small, six railcars High, scenario 2 1,20 1,963Large, eight railcars Low, scenario 1 1,27 2,024Large, eight railcars High, scenario 2 1,16 1,73Table: 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 systemon order to investigate the size of the market for a Swedish transport system with high-speed freighttrains. Seven companies have been contacted of which four have responded. The amount of goodsthat could be transferred to high-speed freight train if such a system existed today is about 8 400tonnes per year. The amount corresponds to the identified goods that for sure would have beentransferred. Cargo volumes for the different relations can be seen in the table below.Relation Godsmängd (ton/år)Stockholm - Göteborg2 900Stockholm - Malmö5 500Table: 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 freighttrains would require market of 196 000 tonnes of freight per year. A transport system consisting ofonly one train would require a market of about a third, which is approximately 65 000 tonnes. Withsuch traffic pattern the cost would be significantly higher for transporting goods with high-speedfreight trains than the calculated values. From these results the conclusion is that there is not a sufficientmarket for a transport system with high-speed freight trains in Sweden.