"It is urgent to respect the timetables and complete in certain and defined times the modernization works in progress on the railway network, so as not to run the risk that transport intermodal system permanently loses traffic shares, and fails to meet potential demand". The Union has underlined this Interporti Riuniti (UIR), the trade association of Italian freight villages, on the occasion of the fourth annual meeting "Interports at the Center 2025" held on Friday in Venice and organized by Interporto Rivers.

UIR highlighted that the -3.2% drop in the number of trains operated in Italian freight terminals recorded in 2024, which follows the -16.5% in 2023, indicates that work on the railway network national at the moment are having a significant impact on the traffic. This - underlined the association - is all the more relevant in view of the fact that the is in contrast to previous years at the opening of the construction sites, during which there had been a progressive annual increase in intermodal rail transport managed by the Italian Interport Network.

According to UIR, it is therefore necessary to manage this phase pending the completion of the projects under the PNRR, as the prospects are encouraging developments, leveraging the significant investments planned by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan currently being drafted implementation by RFIs that are intended to remove constraints and infrastructural "bottlenecks" on the rail network that currently limit the possibility of organize intermodal trains.

The Unione Interporti Riuniti also stressed the need not to neglect the network nodes consisting of the terminals and, to this end, to effectively support the sector, has proposed the introduction of additional incentive mechanisms for railway terminals that can be defined as "bonus terminals", that understand aspects of railway shunting, not only and terminalization.

In addition, UIR has positively judged the activity in course on "mapping of existing intermodal freight terminals", provided for by the directive of the Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, to be carried out as part of the strategic objective of "ensure adequate distribution of freight terminals multimodal aircraft with a transhipment capacity adequate to to meet the needs of the Trans-European Network of transport". Considering that this mapping, which will have to To be completed by next September, is an activity provided for by European Regulation 2024/1679 referring to the activities that individual Member States will have to put in place by 19 July 2027 for the identification of new intermodal terminals, is the UIR hopes that this will not lead to a proliferation of of new structures, but that the work produced is, instead, preparatory to an optimization of the network.