IT is a cold but still evening at Helrom’s rail freight terminal at Lébény in western Hungary. The sun has just set, and the local team has gathered to await the arrival of today’s service from Regensburg in southern Germany. The train is running around
3 hours behind schedule, progress hindered due to an incident in Vienna earlier in the day. But after completing their preparatory work and briefing ahead of tonight’s shift, the team is in a relaxed mood, ready for the task ahead.
Suddenly, headlights come into view. The train is nearing its destination on the Vienna - Budapest main line and the joking around has stopped. Cigarettes are stubbed out, and the team springs into action. A shunting locomotive that left the terminal for the mainline a few minutes earlier is poised to split the 18-wagon train onto the two parallel tracks that are located on either side of the terminal. A load master walks along the track to observe the train roll into position as the four drivers of the terminal’s nimble shuttle trucks crank up their engines and speed across the tarmac to unload the first trailers.
Working the controls at the side of the Helrom-branded flat wagon, each loaded with two semi-trailers, the loas master unlocks the first wagon from its loaded position, releasing a guiding arm that enables the hydraulic-powered platform on which the trailer is sitting to steadily swing away from the wagon. The truck is already in position, with the driver reversing it into place beneath the trailer, which is then coupled to the truck and smoothly hauled off the wagon, and then driven to a loading area on the other side of the terminal. Here the driver parks the trailer ready for collection by one of the trucks that are beginning to gather outside the terminal gates.
Back at the front of the train, and within a few minutes of being unloaded, another truck has arrived hauling an outbound trailer. With great skill, and with only a few centimetres to play with, the driver carefully reverses the trailer into position on the rotated wagon platform, helped by the assistant at the rear who instructs the driver to release the trailer when it is in the correct position. He then locks the trailer in place and moves to the control panel where, at a push of a button, the platform swings back into place, albeit with some slight adjustments to ensure the correct height. Now sitting parallel to the track, it is ready to depart.
This process continues for the entire train. The 36 trailers are unloaded and loaded at impressive speed from the front and rear of each wagon, with the same unloading and loading process repeated over and over. Maintenance checks are also carried out and any adjustments made as the teams steadily move to the second track as the loading and unloading of the first half of the train nears completion. The line up of semi-trailers positioned in the centre of the terminal ahead of the train’s arrival is slowly shrinking as the minutes tick by. Priority shipments are loaded first in order to be unloaded promptly at the other end. Indeed, the loading of the train is not left to chance. Riding around the terminal on a bicycle is the Dezső Frank, the load master and shift supervisor. Carrying a tablet, he matches the registration numbers of the trailers with the list on the screen, effectively checking in and out each trailer as it is moved, ensuring that the carefully planned operation is executed to plan.
“You won’t find another railway operator in Europe or in North America that is doing a 1000km round trip in
Roman Noack, Helrom’s CEO
24 hours, six times a week.”
After around 3 hours all work is completed and the train is ready to depart at its scheduled time of 05.00 the following morning, the 3 hours lost to the delay made up. Tired but exhilarated, the team meets again to debrief, report any lessons learned, and improvements that might be made to tomorrow’s shift when they will be back doing the same thing all over again.
“You won’t find another railway operator in Europe or in North America that is doing a 1000km round trip in
24 hours, six times a week,” explains Roman Noack, Helrom’s CEO and one of two co-founders of the company, which is based in Frankfurt, Germany.
The sole customer for Helrom’s Regensburg - Lébény service is Audi. The terminal in Regensburg, which is owned by Bayernhafen, serves the car manufacturer’s factories in Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm, while Helrom’s own terminal in Lébény serves Audi’s Györ plant as well more than 50 component suppliers located in western Hungary and elsewhere in eastern Europe. Helrom is partnering with road haulier Duvenbeck Logistics for the service, which accounts for around 95% of Audi’s inbound movements on the corridor. The partners closely coordinate the delivery of trailers to each terminal and subsequent departures to their final destination.
Noack reports that the contract with Audi came about after his sales colleagues were encouraged to respond to an upcoming tender to find a rail freight operator. After initial reluctance due to the relatively short route that Audi was proposing, Helrom took the plunge to offer a just-in-time service, its first block train. “They gave us their data, and then we defined the ideal way to collect trailers and the ideal way to distribute them,” Noack says.
After a year of preparation, including developing the previously abandoned terminal site at Lébény, the service commenced on April 4 2024. Just over a year in, it is now reporting a reliability rate of more than 90%. Critically, the train is saving 185,000 road-km a week by taking 360 lorries off the road, helping to reduce CO₂ emissions by up to 11,500 tonnes a year. It has also reduced the number of freight forwarders Audi is working with to just one while the number of drivers required - staffing being a major issue for road hauliers in Europe - has been reduced by over 40%.
Foundations
Noack reveals that the inspiration for Helrom came during his days of commuting while working for DB Cargo. He compared the number of lorries speeding past him on the motorway with what he saw on the railway, noting a stark contrast. Around 75% of Europe’s lorries are semi-trailers but very few are moved by rail, where freight traffic is dominated by single wagonload, block trains and containers. “Only 2% of trailers measured in tonne-km use rail,” Noack says. “But almost everything that is moved in Europe is done so by semi-trailers.”
With incumbent operator DB Cargo “having no interest in this kind of traffic,” according to Noack, and new entrants to the European rail freight market largely unwilling to take the plunge, instead competing for existing traffic, Noack spotted an opportunity. “I spoke with my mentor Keith Heller about what I saw and what I thought was possible,” he says. “He told me that we can do this together.”
The partners began looking for technical solution that would enable non-craneable semi-trailers to be easily loaded onto wagons while offering a competitive logistics service requiring a comparatively small investment in terminal facilities. They soon identified the Megaswing technology developed by Swedish group Kockums Industries in the early 2000s as having the greatest potential. Finding that it was for sale, in 2018 Noack says he gathered together family members and several small investors to purchase the technology outright.
Now owned by Helrom, Noack reports how adjustments were made to the hydraulic system to suit its needs. Manufacturing of the first batch of 18 wagons for its first train was subsequently undertaken by Gök Rail of Turkey “as no European manufacturers were interested at this time.” And while the Covid-19 pandemic caused some delays, Helrom was able to launch its first service in January 2021.
The service runs from Düsseldorf to Vienna, and unlike the Audi block train, it is available to all shippers, freight forwarders and carriers to book the 40 trailer slots on each train via the Helrom website. Noack reports particular interest from pharmaceutical companies and food suppliers due to the just-in-time capability of its service, with many first-time users of rail.
With momentum building, attention inevitably shifted to expansion. More capital was required and this was found when Swiss Life Asset Management completed the acquisition of a “significant stake” in Helrom, becoming an anchor investor in April 2022. Additional funding to support the Audi project was secured through a €15m grant from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digitalisation and Transport (BMDV) in February 2023, while a €34.5m loan agreement was reached with French bank Société Générale and Deutsche Anlagen-Leasing (DAL) in June 2023.
With funding in place, an order for 40 wagons was placed with Austria’s Machine Factory Leizen (MFL) in January 2023 for delivery within 12 months. It was followed by another supply contract for 62 more wagons with Greenbrier Europe, who Noack describes as a very important partner. The supplier is manufacturing what it terms Trail Rail wagons to Helrom specifications at its plant in Świdnica, Poland, and can supply further wagons as required. Helrom currently operates a leased locomotive fleet including eight units from Beacon Rail and four from Polish leasing company Cargounit.
Since launching the Audi train, Helrom has introduced further routes and is steadily expanding its offer. As of May 2025 it currently operates the following routes, all of which are available to any customer, with Helrom now serving a pool of more than 50: Düsseldorf - Vienna; Düsseldorf - Budapest; Düsseldorf - Verona; Düsseldorf- Trento; and Regensburg - Verona. In addition, it is currently preparing to launch a new route between the Ruhr and Silesia, while the Braunschweig - Vienna service launched in June 2024 is currently not operating.
Operating model
While the Kockums wagon technology is the centrepiece of the Helrom concept, it is complemented by what Noack describes as the second key building block: its operating model. Noack explains that high levels of reliability are integral to Helrom’s pitch for effective inbound logistics. “This requires no train cancellations and a pretty good on-time performance and very good communication with the customer,” he says, adding that several key steps are taken to ensure this is achieved, including by minimising potential conflicts with other operators to avoid major disruption.
“We like to collaborate with existing hubs, like the port in Vienna,” Noack says. “But we need a way in and a way out, where we have a clear track and a clear loading track, so we have a bit of flexibility and that is enabled by this technology. The technology can move not only all trailers and non-craneable trailers, tank trailers and reefer trailers, but as we can load and unload from the tarmac, we can start and end trains in places ideal from a supply chain perspective and also in places where we can control our service.”
Secondly, he says Helrom does everything itself: from operating its own locomotives, both for mainline duties and shunting, to carrying out maintenance. “We don’t have one party doing one thing and another doing something else,” he says. “We control everything but the [railway] infrastructure.”
Noack adds that the inspiration for this operating strategy is Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). Originally pioneered by Hunter Harrison at Canadian National (CN) in the 2000s, it is now the overarching doctrine governing the operations of many of North America’s Class 1 railways.
Heller was one of the leading lights at CN under Harrison, before his career took him to Europe to lead English, Welsh and Scottish Railway (EWS) after CN acquired a 42.5% stake in EWS through its purchase of parent company Wisconsin Central in 2001. EWS later became a subsidiary of DB Cargo. Noack explains that PSR emphasises high asset utilisation, which is executed through a highly efficient and effective plan of operations that is carefully managed and repeated, day in, day out. “It is this element of the PSR philosophy that we have brought to Europe,” he says. “We also adhere to the key principles of management in PSR: safety, service, asset utilisation, cost control, sustainability and people, and always continuous improvement.
“This operating model is evident in what happens at Lébény,” Noack continues. “Every day we do it the same way. The same arrival and departure time, and if you have a delay, you catch up at the other end. We speed things up in Regensburg, so the next day we will again be on schedule in Lébény.”
“We don’t have one party doing one thing and another doing something else,” he says. “We control everything but the [railway] infrastructure.”
Roman Noack
Noack adds that the resilience of the Helrom service is proving especially attractive to clients. Rather than going after traditional rail freight flows, Helrom is focusing on offering the road haulage industry, “the backbone of Europe’s decentralised economy,” a way of decarbonising its operations. With major companies like Audi pursuing net-zero strategies, he reports finding plenty of potential customers who are open-minded about using rail, adding that Helrom is encouraging prospective customers to try the service on existing routes to gain confidence, with a view to integrating it into their wider supply chains.
“We want to be a transport partner for the road sector, and for those who manage the supply chains on a significant scale all over continental Europe,” he says.
With the concept proven, Helrom is eyeing further expansion beyond central Europe. Noack expects to launch a service in France in 2026, potentially connecting with the Iberian Peninsula, while Scandinavia is also very much on the company’s radar.
Licensing of the Helrom technology to other companies interested in exploring “routes that we would never consider” is a further potential avenue for growth, with Helrom providing maintenance under any such agreement. Indeed, at a time when meeting the targets for freight modal shift seems as elusive as ever in Europe, Helrom appears to be offering a viable and attractive solution, that is market-driven and not reliant on subsidy, and which could potentially offer the paradigm shift required to finally make a significant dent in road’s dominant market share. Helrom certainly has the ambition to sustain its current momentum and it is definitely an operator to watch in the coming years.
“Big companies are listening to us,” Noack says. “They realise that they need to rethink intermodal transport and that they have to be open to using new technologies. Our market is not rail, it’s road. Rail is just the mode that we use.”
