photo: Cyrille Guyon on LinkedIn/Cyrille Guyon
In an exclusive interview with RAILTARGET, Cyrille Guyon, Deputy Managing Director of ERMEWA SA, shares insights into the company’s strategy at Transport Logistic 2025.
From unveiling a new wagon tailored for palletized goods to scaling up smart wagon technologies and tackling the future of intermodal transport, Guyon outlines ERMEWA’s vision for modernizing rail freight and making it more attractive, sustainable, and competitive in the face of today’s market challenges.
Transport Logistic is a great opportunity to show what's new. Today, you are presenting the new wagon for palletized goods. What makes it special for your customers?
If we look back, palletized products were not transported much by rail in the last few decades, only for very specific products.The idea is to create a system that enables customers to be attracted by rail freight and bring pallets on rail, which are mainly transported by trucks nowadays. We've decided to innovate and bring something from the 19th century into the 21st century, with strong innovation. As you've seen in the demonstration, we have the automated opening, increased safety level with hardboard, and we obviously have sensors inside.We have energy, and, therefore, it makes it more attractive to the sector to transport certain palletized products by rail.
There's currently a big wave of growth in intermodal transport across the rail freight market. How is ERMEWA responding to this trend and what role does intermodal play in your overall strategy?
Unfortunately, currently intermodal is not as big as we would like it to be.There has been a dip in volume recently. Having said that, ERMEWA has not been a strong player in intermodal since 2019 or something. Then we started to invest heavily, and now intermodal represents roughly 12% of our entire fleet, out of our 50,000 wagons.We are operating the full range of intermodal fleets across Europe in order to develop a modal shift the way it should be. Therefore, you need investments.
ERMEWA is also presenting smart wagon technologies here at the fair, like sensors and digital systems. What are the main benefits of these innovations for your clients and how do they help improve everyday operations?
You have two aspects of innovation and technology. The first one is how to improve your data collection in order to integrate more data into your system, enable better safety, and manage your operation better.The second pillar is really to be able to communicate with the entire ecosystem, whether it's your rail undertaking, your industrial customer, and who knows tomorrow maybethe infrastructure managers. So that we are all connected to one system and relying on one source of truth, which is not always the case today.
What's your view on how the rail freight market will develop over in next few years? Are you expecting more competition, more cooperation, or new business models?
Today, the competition is there and will remain. I think it's good for the system. Competition is good because it brings performance, and it's also a way to make sure everyone is on their toes to perform better.What we see as a difficulty is the fact that the system as such, or rail freight operation is not as performingasit should be compared to transport in general.Also, the cost factor is very difficult to control in rail and something we need to work on as an industry, not individually as a lesser or an undertaking.It's a system which needs to improve and be economically more performing, so we will be more attractive.
My last question is, if you're looking ahead, what are the main challenges and opportunities for wagon leasing companies like ERMEWA, especially when it comes to sustainability and customer expectations?
If we look at it from the product range point we have to carry by rail, it's bulk. This is the future. Also, palletized products. We need to be attractive. Raw materials are being transported by rail on a large scale, but manufactured products? Very little. We need to be attractive for manufactured products, and this is what we want to do in the future.