EUROPE: Polish freight terminal operator CLIP and Luxembourg’s CFL Multimodal are to launch a ‘rail motorway’ service between Swarzędz near Poznań and Bettembourg-Dudelange by end of this year. There will initially be four round trips per week, each with a capacity of 37 intermodal units. The Lohr piggyback system will be

Dorset’s Swanage Railway is following in the steps of the West Somerset Railway by undertaking a complete governance review of both the Swanage Railway Trust (SRT) and Swanage Railway Company (SRC). A letter signed by SRT chairman Gavin Jones and his SRC counterpart Liz Sellen was sent to members during

ISRAEL: Bombardier Transportation has singed a contract to supply 74 Twindexx Vario double-deck coaches to Israel Railways. The €147m order announced on June 6 is an option on a framework agreement signed in October 2010 and will take ISR’s total fleet of Bombardier double-deck coaches to 586. The order covers

EUROPE: Mercitalia Logistics Chief Executive Marco Gosso strongly criticised the performance of European infrastructure managers at the Transport Logistic trade show in München on June 6. Insisting that the FS subsidiary would ‘increase the pressure on infrastructure managers’, Gosso said that freight operators were still not being adequately compensated for day-to-day

GERMANY: DB Regio has placed its first order for Stadler Kiss double-deck electric multiple-units, signing a €220m contract on June 5 for 18 four-car units for use in Schleswig-Holstein. This follows the award in April of a contract for incumbent and sole bidder DB Regio to continue to operate Elektronetz Ost services

HS2 under spotlight HS2 is under review to ensure that it can be delivered, the transport secretary has revealed. Chris Grayling said HS2 chairman Allan Cook was analysing whether the high speed lines connecting London, Birmingham and eventually Leeds and Manchester could be built within the existing budget of

INTERNATIONAL: ‘The most important stop of the day!’ is the slogan for this year’s International Level Crossing Awareness Day on June 6, which is targeting professional drivers of lorries, buses, coaches, farm, industry and emergency vehicles with the message that a brief stop is always preferable to a serious accident

PAY talks between London Underground and the RMT have collapsed, and the union is preparing strike ballot papers for its 10,000 London Underground members.Transport for London said it is now asking the conciliation service ACAS to help with the next stage of negotiations. The union claimed that there had been no

CHINA: The 272 km Karamay – Tacheng railway in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of northwest China opened on May 30. Tacheng had been the only prefectural capital in the region without a rail link. The new line diverges from the Kuitun – Beitun – Altai line at Karamay and runs northwest

TWO possible designs of trains for HS2 have been unveiled today.One proposal has come from Alstom and the other from Bombardier and Hitachi. Alstom has built TGVs in France, Avelia Liberty in the USA and AGVs in Italy. It also built the first generation of Eurostar trains and Pendolinos for Virgin