French alumina producer Alteo is hoping to restore a rail freight link between the port of Fos-sur-Mer and its Gardanne plant near Aix-en-Provence as early as the first half of 2027. However, the feasibility depends less on the company’s readiness than on how much track space a much larger neighbour will need at the same port terminal.
The Gardanne site, which supplies specialty aluminas to various sectors, ran 14 trains a week to and from Marseille until March 2022. The rail service ended when Alteo switched from bauxite to alumina hydrate, which cannot be stored outdoors and requires covered warehousing only available at Marseille’s Bassins Est. Since then, materials have been moved by road: between 30 and 50 trucks a day, doubled by empty return legs. Alteo always intended for this arrangement to be temporary, pending delivery of warehouses dedicated to storing alumina hydrate.
Track space is the constraint
Rehabilitating the Gardanne end – converting equipment built for bauxite to handle hydrate – is estimated at €2.2 million, half of which will be public funds. Alteo has already committed €673,000 of that budget, said Patrick Schneider, Alteo’s site director in Gardanne. However, works have since been put on stand-by to align the six-month schedule with progress at Fos, which HES (which manages the port terminal) is leading. Gardanne’s private siding totals more than 3,000 metres of track across seven lines; the rail project would rehabilitate around 400 metres of it, bringing more than 1,800 metres of usable track on three lines back into service.
On the Fos side, a separate €2.5 million package to rebuild the port siding is backed by the Métropole Aix-Marseille-Provence and the state; HES is expected to subcontract the works to Captrain, part of SNCF’s Rail Logistics Europe. The plan would include trains of 15 to 25 wagons. “It would take 350 metres of length to make up the trains,” Schneider said, and the service is expected to take around 35 trucks a day off the road once running, cutting roughly 1,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.
That plan was disrupted when Italian steel group Marcegaglia, investing more than €1 billion in the former Ascométal site nearby to handle scrap, slabs and coils, was found to need the same rail footprint for its own shuttle trains. “They weigh several million tonnes; we’re at 250,000,” Schneider said, contrasting the two flows. HES has been reworking its layout since, with an update expected in September. “It’s not worth starting a train between Fos and Gardanne only to dismantle it in two years because we can’t reconcile the two flows,” he added. “If we run trains, it’s to run them for the long term.”
Bigger plans already in the works
Alain Moscatello, Alteo’s chairman, framed the new terminal as part of a wider shift rather than a one-off fix. “Securing supply is a strategic issue for European industry,” he said, adding that the project shows local players can “build solutions that strengthen industrial competitiveness, economic appeal and the transition of transport modes.”
HES and Alteo are already weighing a second phase at Fos: a new hangar with capacity for 45,000 to 90,000 tonnes, with an investment decision possible within 12 months and commissioning targeted for 2028.
“If we’re going to Fos, it’s not to add more kilometres by truck, it’s to run trains,” Schneider added. The bauxite-era rail link into the mineral terminal had badly degraded by 2022, with poor drainage causing subsidence that forced convoys to run at 5 km/h.
Operators circling an open contract
No haulier has yet been contracted. RDT13, the Bouches-du-Rhône operator now folded into transport authority RTM, has pitched its short-distance rail freight scheme, backed by EU-approved subsidies to make sub-100km rail cost-competitive with trucking. Reviving the service at five round trips a week would also reopen the disused Rognac–Aix-en-Provence line, which needs at least three weekly trains to stay active and has been advocated by regional passenger advocates.
Beyond hydrate imports, Alteo is eyeing a return leg of containers carrying its own finished aluminas (historically around 20 TEU a day) once the primary flow is secured. This would also include reviving a long-standing plan to move containers by rail toward major export markets in Asia and the United States. With parent group United Mining Supply International (UMSI) developing a Guinea alumina refinery for 2029–2030, Fos could eventually feed rail-borne alumina to other European smelters, Schneider said, “but the first kilometre has to work before we talk about the next ones.”
