French rail-road freight traffic posted modest growth in the first half of the year but there was a sharp contrast in performance between domestic and international routes, participants heard at a one-day conference organised by trade body GNTC earlier this week.
General manager, Aurelien Barbé, noted that traffic expressed in train-kilometres was up by 5.6% year-on-year and by 2.4% when expressed in tonne-kilometres.
Domestic routes were up 9.6% in terms of tonne-kilometres, benefiting from a number of factors, among them sustained market demand and the commissioning of new routes. However, it was a far poorer picture for international routes which decreased by almost 11%.
“The decline on international routes can be largely attributed to difficulties on the German network where a good deal of renovation work is currently taking place and which had led in some cases to traffic being stopped. There have also been disruptions to traffic flows in Italy,” he explained.
For the full year, 2025, rail-road traffic had increased 4.7% and 3.2% year-on-year in train-kilometres and tonne-kilometres respectively.
Results still lag ‘record year of 2022′
Last year’s results were better than those posted in 2024 and 2023, the latter year being particularly weak because of a spate of strike action at SNCF which affected the whole sector. However, 2025 did not match the record year of 2022. Nevertheless, traffic on domestic routes last year increased by some 19% versus 2022. Traffic on international routes fell 32%. Earlier this year, the GNTC estimated that combined rail-road transport accounts for almost 45% of total rail freight in France.
As for river-road transport, the number of TEU carried decreased by 6.2% year-on-year in the first half of 2026 and by 8.6 % in 2025. However, the decline was reduced to 0.4% in the second quarter of this year, which may point to an improvement in market conditions.
Digital map gives snapshot of sector
Barbé also took the opportunity at the conference to present the GNTC’s new digital map, which provides a snapshot of rail-road combined transport services in France.
“We’ve listed 21 combined transport operators – and we can, of course, add more. We have over 260 rail-road routes, more than 2,500 trains per week and over 93 terminal sites and ports offering multimodal services. With this digital map one can search for solutions, origins and destinations, filter options by operator or by region, view frequencies, timetables and the UTI codes accepted on each route. It’s a bit like a Google Maps for combined transport,” he observed.