ONE year since French National Railways’ (SNCF) freight subsidiary Fret SNCF was broken up, the dust hovering over the French rail freight market has started to settle. Perhaps the clearest outcome so far is the boost to intermodal services after former Fret SNCF contracts, the majority of them for intermodal, were taken up by competitors and not lost to road as originally feared.
The French government agreed to break up Fret SNCF following a European Commission (EC) investigation into whether it provided illegal state aid for the loss-making freight operator. While the initial effect was to hinder Fret SNCF’s major competitors as they put plans to launch new services in 2025 on hold as they absorbed former Fret SNCF traffic, in the longer term intermodal services appear to be on an upward trajectory.
Key players who took on former Fret SNCF intermodal services include Belgian freight operator Lineas and CFL Cargo of Luxembourg, both of which have extended their networks southwards to the Spanish border. The transfer of intermodal traffic also resulted in Groupe Charles André, the owner of Novatrans, setting up its own freight operating subsidiary GCA Traction, which took over the Miramas - Dourges service in May 2025.
Fellow private operator RégioRail has significantly reinforced its presence in the intermodal market by taking over the operation of the service from Perpignan to Valenton, a major hub in the southern suburbs of Paris, on behalf of Novatrans. RégioRail has also started a weekly dedicated service to Valenton from Golbey, near Epinal in eastern France, carrying new cardboard from the Norsk Skog factory and returning with waste paper for recycling.
In northwestern France, Naviland Cargo has launched a new service from Montoir-de-Bretagne to Le Havre via Tours, connecting with its existing network. DB Cargo France has launched, at its own risk, a daily service from Valenton to Champigneulles near Nancy and Metz in eastern France, both less than 400km from the capital.
New terminal boost
The French government’s strategic plan for intermodal, published in October 2024, was a rather theoretical document which identified where new terminals might be needed, and in the following 12 months several small new terminals opened. Much activity has taken place in the Brittany region, where Lahaye Logistics has taken over the Rennes terminal and plans to increase capacity in order to accommodate a third daily service.
Lahaye became a freight operator in late 2024 with the aim of serving the whole of this part of northwestern France. In April 2025, the company also switched traction from Novatrans to DB Cargo in order to extend one service from Rennes to Vénissieux in the suburbs of Lyon, while the second service to northern France now runs to Dourges, south of Lille, instead of Lille itself, increasing interchange potential. Capacity at Vénissieux is being boosted by 40%; the terminal already accounts for 10% of French intermodal traffic.
Elsewhere in northwestern France, small terminals which closed recently at Morlaix, Château-Gontier and Le Mans will be reviewed, while Brittany regional council has a strategic plan to increase rail’s market share and would like to see rail traffic return to the port of Brest. Two new terminals are also under construction at Saint-Berthevin outside Laval, which is due to open later this year, and at Trélazé near Angers, which is expected to open in 2027.
In southern France, a completely new terminal was opened by logistics group Open Modal in Miramas in early 2025, replacing the facility at Marseille Canet which is due to be redeveloped. Miramas is some 60km from the centre of Marseille, but is closer to the port of Fos-sur-Mer and several logistics terminals. Open Modal expects to take over the Fenouillet terminal near Toulouse from infrastructure manager SNCF Network. The terminal at Noisy-le-Sec in the eastern suburbs of Paris is also due to be transferred but requires modernisation. Combirail took over traction of Open Modal’s Miramas - Avignon - Lille service in early 2025.
Expansion of the major terminal at Dourges is currently under study. German logistics firm Contargo recently bought a 10% share in the terminal and launched two new services to Germany and Poland in September 2025. These carry significant traffic for tyre manufacturer Michelin, which is pressing for a connecting service from Dourges to its traditional base in Clermont-Ferrand.
After a slow start, piggyback services carrying unaccompanied lorry semi-trailers are starting to multiply fast.
In September 2025, Froidcombi, which specialises in refrigerated fruit and vegetable traffic, launched a new 140km/h service operating five times a week in each direction between Lille and Arles, a town in southern France which has not had a container service before. A group of five partners led by the Arles chamber of commerce is investing €10m in upgrading the terminal located on the River Rhône. A month later, Arles gained a second intermodal service, hauled by DB Cargo France and operating three times a week from Vayres near Bordeaux. Located on the Paris - Bordeaux main line, Vayres is the site of a distribution depot operated by major road haulier Combronde. It is hoped to introduce services from Arles to Paris and northern Europe.
In contrast with these developments, work has yet to start on the new state-financed terminal at Les Aubrais in Orléans, originally due to open in 2025. The small facility will be served by only one train a day, handling around 30 containers a day in the medium term and 55 by 2045.
After a slow start, piggyback services carrying unaccompanied lorry semi-trailers are starting to multiply fast, almost all using Modalohr swing-tray wagons. The most frequent starts at Bettembourg in Luxembourg and runs to Le Boulou on the Spanish border, and some services have been extended to Barcelona in the past. Operated by Lorry Rail, the service now runs 27 times a week in each direction, with each train carrying around 50 semi-trailers. CFL Cargo took over traction of this service from Fret SNCF in 2024 and intends to replace the 4.2MW SNCF class BB 27000 electric locomotives hauling this service with Stadler Euro 6000 locomotives leased from Alpha Trains. Deploying the six-axle 6MW Stadler design will enable train length to be increased from 750m to 850m without the need for double-heading.
Other Modalohr trains operate from Calais to Le Boulou, Sète and Mâcon, and from the Channel port of Cherbourg to Mouguerre, near Bayonne and close to the Spanish border. In October 2025 a new Lorry Rail service was launched from Bettembourg to Mouguerre, operating four times a week from November with traction provided by Captrain France. Due to open later this year, a Modalohr terminal is under construction at Rungis, the Paris wholesale food market, and will be operated by VIIA. The new terminal is costing €36m, part-funded by central government. Services under consideration to serve it include Barcelona - Rungis - Antwerp and Perpignan - Rungis - Dunkirk.
On the downside, the cross-border service between Aiton, near Chambéry, and Orbassano, near Turin, has been withdrawn. This was the first Modalohr service to be launched and was introduced in response to the fire in the Mont Blanc road tunnel which killed 39 people on March 24 1999, resulting in the banning of lorries carrying hazardous goods through the tunnel. The service to Orbassano never ran more than four times a day and operated at a reduced frequency for several years due to work in the cross-border Fréjus rail tunnel and its approaches in France. Plans for an extension to Lyon came to nothing, and the final nail in the coffin seems to have been the closure of the cross-border line for 592 days following a rockfall on the French side on August 27 2023. A tender launched in 2024 to find a new operator for the service attracted no bidders.
Cross-Channel revival?
The promise of developing intermodal traffic to Britain via the Channel Tunnel has been dashed on several occasions, but there are currently plans for two new services. After setting up its hub in Valenton, DB Cargo hopes to launch a new service from there to Daventry later this year. A plan to relaunch a shuttle between Dourges and Barking in east London is also in the pipeline, but has been shelved due to an increase in business rates in Britain.
Piggyback services from Calais, driven by cross-Channel traffic, are booming and the Boulogne-Calais port authority PBC hopes to double traffic from 46,000 loads in 2024 to 100,000 within five years. This will see the service to Sète increase from three to six train pairs a week early this year, with traffic expected to grow from 15,000 to 40,000 semi-trailers a year. The service to Mâcon will subsequently be increased from three to five train pairs a week, and the Le Boulou service from nine to 12. These services are operated by VIIA with Modalohr wagons and terminals, while CargoBeamer is in competition. The company has a terminal close by, which uses a different system of loading baskets that are moved horizontally onto the wagons. PBC and VIIA are now studying the possibility of a new service between Calais and eastern Europe. VIIA also hopes to be able to increase train lengths from 750m to 850m.
In Dunkirk, around 30km to the east of Calais, a new terminal, able to accommodate four train pairs a day, is due to open next month. Modalis will manage the terminal and has established operator Traix to haul the trains. The first service will operate to Italy via Lyon. Much of the traffic in Dunkirk will be driven by ferries to/from Ireland, as is the case for the Brittany Ferries Modalohr service from Cherbourg to Mouguerre which started in May 2025. With Traix, Modalis intends to bring in-house the traction of intermodal services from Chalon-sur-Saône to Le Havre and Fos-sur-Mer which it already manages through subsidiary Delta Rail.
In the second half of 2025, German operator Helrom, with its own patented swing-tray technology, opened an office in France. The rival French Modalohr system still has a strong lead, however, with terminals open in Calais, Cherbourg, Le Boulou, Mâcon, Mouguerre and Sète. The latter is the most recent, inaugurated in November 2025 and costing €20m, of which VIIA provided €10.1m for the Modalohr facilities and the Occitanie region and investment funds €9.4m for related infrastructure work. Plans for a Modalohr terminal at Gennevilliers, a river port in the northern suburbs of Paris, have been shelved due to the difficulty of obtaining paths between frequent commuter services.
More transit traffic
Since 2000, France has lost almost all transit traffic moving between the Benelux countries, Switzerland and Italy, with most diverted to Germany due to frequent industrial action and service unreliability. However, the major freight route along the right bank of River Rhine via Freiburg is now close to capacity and subject to frequent closures for track maintenance work.
Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) has recently established a French subsidiary, SBB Cargo France, with the aim of giving customers an alternative to the route via Germany. SBB Cargo France started activities in early 2025, working with Lineas on the Zeebrugge - Milan route, where its drivers take charge of trains between its operating base in the French town of Thionville, close to the border with Luxembourg, and Basle in Switzerland. In June and July 2025 SBB Cargo France operated trains through France between Basle and Strasbourg for customer Chemoil under its own safety certificate, to test the route and operational procedures. Late last year SBB Cargo France set up training facilities for drivers for the Metz and Strasbourg areas, and from this year expects to lease Traxx MS3 electric locomotives for this corridor.
Plans are now in hand to create a permanent corridor through France via Metz and Strasbourg. This is considered so important that the Swiss government has proposed to finance enlargement to the P400 loading gauge of six tunnels totalling 4.6km near Saverne between Metz and Strasbourg. Providing the P400 loading gauge to accommodate wagons carrying semi-trailers is an issue throughout France as its non-availability is barrier to developing intermodal services. For example, until enlargement work is carried out in tunnels on the main line between Poitiers and Bordeaux, the Cherbourg - Mougurre Modalohr service is operating over a non-electrified route via Niort. At the same time, operators such as Lahaye are investing in new wagons to carry P400 traffic without the need for gauge enhancement work.
In early 2025 container shipping line MSC set up rail freight subsidiary Medway France and in December 2025 took over one of the services shed by Fret SNCF. The company’s subsidiary Medlog is already active in the inland waterway sector in France and has invested in a terminal at Bruyères-sur-Oise north of Paris. The company intends to launch a rail service to Le Havre when its barges on this route are full.
MSC is well-established in Le Havre, France’s busiest container port, which by international standards is poorly served by rail. The LHTE terminal at the port opened in 2015 and has 22 tracks, but is only served by around 20 trains a week at present, mostly operated by SNCF subsidiary Naviland Cargo.
Based in Marseille, French container shipping line CMA CGM is MSC’s key competitor, and its recent acquisition of Freightliner Intermodal from Genesee & Wyoming may presage its arrival on the French rail freight market. This would build on the growth seen in 2025 when no fewer than 10 new intermodal services were launched by eight operators in France, with the signs being that this expansion will continue this year and beyond.
New markets for intermodal
SOME intermodal operations in France are quite unusual. Almost all trains of aggregates from the Carrières de l’Ouest quarry at Voutré, west of Le Mans, to the Paris region are now formed of open containers on flat wagons, instead of more conventional bogie hopper wagons. Using containers enables the trains to be back-loaded with inert spoil from building sites in the Paris region, which is then deposited in worked-out sections of the quarry, which dispatches around 2.5 million tonnes of stone by rail each year.
In the south of France, RégioRail carries clinker in containers from the port of Sète to two small cement plants in Tonneins and Portes-les-Valence, which were recently built without specialised wagon unloading facilities. A third plant is under construction at Ottmarsheim on the Rhine south of Strasbourg, on the border between France and Germany.
The Seine river port at Limay, 50km west of Paris, now dispatches small numbers of containers to Ottmarsheim, as well as to Vénissieux and Geneva. These movements, and others on the Le Havre - Ottmarsheim route, are organised by SeaRailShuttle which uses Hexafret’s wagonload network as a slow but relatively cheap method for handling small traffic volumes. The company is looking into a Limay - Nantes service.
