🚆 Less traffic on the streets: Pulling cargo through the alps (Cab Ride Switzerland | Spiez - Weil)

Switzerland is a small, landlocked country in the middle of Europe. It is an important transit country for many goods through Europe and specially the alpine corridor is a bottleneck. A base tunnel through the alps for street traffic does not exist. Everything has to drive up, through one of the many tunnels and downhill again. Truck after truck, each one carrying only a small amount of goods and burning fossile fuel. This is where the so-called "UKV" trains step in: Whole semi trailers and containers are loaded onto pocket wagons in specialized terminals, combined into a big train and pulled through multiple countries, including the crossing of the alps. Only electric locomotives are used for this task, making it not only very environmentally friendly, but also massively reducing street traffic, train by train. It also creates a benefit for the truck drivers: They are no longer driving multiple days through Europe, stuck in traffic jams and polluting the air. Instead, it takes one truck to deliver a trailer to the terminal and another one, hundereds of kilometers away, to take the trailer to its intended destination. And the truckers spend more time at home!

Join me on this UKV train, which I took from Spiez in the Bernese alps to Weil am Rhein in southern Germany. The train started in Gallarate (IT) and will remain unchanged up until Geleen (NL). A distance of almost 900km on the streets, dozens of trucks simply gone - because of this one train. And there are many more like it, every day on multiple routes! A simple, but very effective concept.

Locomotive: Re 486 (Bombardier TRAXX)
More information about the train and the trip is displayed in the video!

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