Railway traffic
Transportation combining road and rail has developed with the spreading and the use of containers.
The container traffic is operated mostly by train (very frequently as cargo units coming from a long shipping trip) and runs only the last kilometres by truck. The rail-road combined traffic is performed also by using the semi-trailers or full trucks with a driver, in these cases it is named accompanied traffic or travelling motorway traffic. Anyhow, it is clear that the degree of evolution of a Freight Village structure has always to be valued in terms of railway traffic.
The following table and chart show the trend of the railways traffic in tons, as registered from 1999 to 2008.
(Source Italian Railway Group)
As shown, railway traffic has restarted growing and registering increases every year after 2002, when the global economy was affected by a negative conjuncture which has been gradually fade, with general signs of improvement of the world economy precisely since 2005.
But if 2007 registered an absolute record of the structure, oppositely the global economic crisis started in 2008 and whose effects were felt most markedly in the second half of the year, as it expected, has affected also the railway traffic trends which decreased of about 12