This very expensive ghost freight station at the gates of Paris


In the 18e district of Paris, a freight station was inaugurated five years ago, Chapelle International, but no train has ever arrived at the platform.





By ThePoint.fr

In five years, the Paris freight station, Chapelle International, has not seen a single train.
 © MAXPPP

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Ihe ambitions of the City of Paris for Chapelle International were high, as was the price of this freight station at the gates of the capital. With this project costing 80 million euros, “44,000 trucks per year will disappear from the roads of Paris and Île-de-France thanks to rail. With, as a result, traffic jams avoided, less noise and less air pollution,” promised Anne Hidalgo at the time of its inauguration in June 2018. Alas, since then, no train has arrived at the platform. , according to our colleagues from “Parisien”.

The idea of ​​this new Parisian station, carried by the public developer Sogaris and SNCF Immobilier, was to transport by train the goods arriving at the Dourges platform, in Pas-de-Calais, and at the port of Bruyères-sur- Oise, in the Val-d’Oise, to Paris. The project even planned to redistribute these products across the capital via electric, hybrid or natural gas vehicles. But this gigantic 15,000 square meter freight station is only a shadow of itself.

According to “Le Parisien”, the flop of Chapelle International can be explained more broadly by the lack of love of companies for rail transport, which is more expensive than road transport. The economic model of freight is not currently viable for distribution groups, despite the efforts of the City of Paris to equip itself with quality infrastructure.

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However, Jonathan Sebbane, CEO of Sogaris, told our colleagues that he did not lose hope of seeing, one day, goods arrive at Chapelle International. In the meantime, the site remains afloat thanks to the establishment of a data center, training spaces, an urban farm and certain activities of La Poste.


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