Bulgaria Moves to Boost 'Rolling Highway' Truck-Rail Freight Traffic

Bulgaria's government is going to reduce substantially the fees for the transport of trucks by railway in order to encourage the use of the so called "Rolling Highway" transport.

The government press service announced that the Cabinet intends to cut in half the amounts charged for transporting trucks by rail collected by the National Company Railway Infrastructure.

The idea of the Cabinet is to stimulate the combination of the truck and railway transport of goods. The measure will refer to the route of Pan-European Transport Corridor No. 10 – from Istanbul, Turkey, to Central Europe.

It will be applied as soon as the second "Rolling Highway" or "Ro-La" terminal in Bulgaria – at the Dragoman train station close to the Serbian border – is completed so that it can be used together with the already completed Ro-La terminal at the Svilengrad train station on the Bulgarian-Turkish border.

Back in July 2010, Bulgaria's Transport Ministry unveiled plans to construct two "Rolling Highway" or "Ro-La" terminals, a combined system allowing the transport of trucks by rail.

Rolling highway is a term originating from the German designation "Rollende Autobahn", also known as "Rollende Landstrasse"/"rolling country road" or abbreviated "RoLa". It is said to have a number of economic and environmental advantages.

At present, Bulgaria charges equally for the train freight transport of containers and of trucks carrying goods - from BGN 0.6331 to BGN 0.6998 per train-kilometer.

With the reduction of the price of the Rolling Highway services, Bulgaria is going to charge between BGN 0.3392 and BGN 0.3749 per train-kilometer per truck; the price for train freight transport of containers remains unchanged.

Another measure in this context mulled by the Borisov Cabinet is to ban the movement of heavy trucks on weekends, thus likely to force more carriers to use the truck-railway option.

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