Environmental impact assessment of rail freight intermodality

The European Commission’s White Paper on transport (European Commission, 2011) seeks to achieve an efficient and sustainable balance between the various transport modes. Environmental impact studies on intermodality transport show that rail freight transport is the land-based transport that has a higher environmental performance compared to intermodal road-rail and all-road transport (Fries and Hellweg, 2014), especially when electrified railway is used (Spielmann and Scholz, 2005). Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology allows us to model as best as possible the environmental impacts of several pollutants in numerous categories. For other categories such as accident damages, noise impact and land use, new developments have to be performed. For the environmental impact assessment, all life cycle phases of rail freight transport operation, rail infrastructure, and rail equipment are taken into account (Spielmann et al., 2007).