The Alps have always and still today represented an important geopolitical barrier for the import and export of goods, faced both through road and rail infrastructures. From this awareness was born the book Guide to freight transport through the Alps (FrancoAngeli), edited by Giancarlo Bertalero, engineer, business consultant, member of the Transalpine Traffic Observatory of the European Commission and of the UFT of Bern, winner of the logistic award of the year in 2016 for having conceived and produced the documentary “Across the Alps” and, again, winner of the Cinemambiente festival in Turin.
This book “aims to be a guide for logistics operators and for purchasing, export and marketing managers of production and distribution companies interested in understanding what opportunities transalpine logistics offer which, thanks also to the evolution of road-rail intermodality, today allows reliable, economically competitive and environmentally sustainable transport. Through symbolic stories of managerial evolutions, this guide aims to open new horizons and involve the reader in a journey across the Alps, passing through the interports, on board trains, trucks and ships”.
Among the pages of the Guide to freight transport across the Alps there are some dedicated precisely to Space Logistic and to recounting our vocation for intermodality and our innovative approach towards customers
, which consists in the perseverance with which we try “to overcome the obstacles that production companies pose to the proposals for changing transport modes: the habit of all-road transport, the classic customer-supplier approach (to be replaced with a partnership between those who export/import products and those who transport them) and finally the short-term vision to be transformed into a medium- and long-term perspective”.
With our great pride, Giancarlo Bertalero chooses to give space to a project put in place by our company: the “ICR – Intermodal Commercial Range”. This solution is dedicated to companies that produce goods whose marketing is limited precisely by the cost of transport. We often talk about products linked to the steel, construction or plant engineering chain which, thanks to a reduction in transport costs, increase their ability to penetrate new markets.
“Until recently, in almost all cases, articulated lorries with open bodies were used, without cambers, which transported the goods by road. The problem associated with the use of this type of vehicle is the inverse flows and the incidence of empty kilometers traveled has a significant impact on the final price of the transport which has repercussions on the customer's final sale price. The geographical distance thus becomes a limit to the development of Italian exports”.
Thanks to a joint study with the client, our company conceived, designed and built intermodal units mirroring the road tipper semi-trailers, increasing the net capacity by over 3 tons and, consequently, reducing loading times by over 60%, costs and environmental impact.
The guide also contains further details, as well as an operational example, but among the contents of the greatest impact, for us, there is the testimony of a Space Logistic customer: “Our company has been open for over 40 years, we ship worldwide on average 250 full loads a day of product in the most disparate ways and related vehicles; this type of vehicle linked to the intermodal system is so simple that no one has ever thought of proposing and implementing it, because we all tend to think that difficult problems require complex solutions”.
