
/en/newsroom/news/2023/september/bordeaux-connections-building-on-local-expertise-for-success

MSC is pleased to celebrate the 5-year anniversary of its Bordeaux Rail Shuttle service following a successful collaboration between the company's Head Office in Geneva, logistics arm MEDLOG and MSC France.
Over the last five years, MSC’s Bordeaux Rail Shuttle has connected Bordeaux city area, with the two biggest ports in France: Le Havre and Fos-sur-Mer. This is a unique service for the French market, putting MSC in an exceptional position to offer improved connections and reliable services as well as helping our customers reduce their carbon footprint.
Working together to create solutions
After five years of success, it’s important to reflect on what brought this exceptional service into being. The answer is what MSC customers have come to expect: local MSC People thinking creatively, combining their local expertise and knowledge with the resources available to them with MSC. Customers in the Bordeaux region were regularly highlighting the need for a solution that would link the South West of France to the main French container ports while maintaining attractive transit times.
The MSC France team therefore worked with partners across the local rail industry to create a new rail service providing direct connections with the two most ports in the country: Le Havre and Fos, both gateways for global trade. The new service has a significant advantage of improving regularity, offering four daily trains, and bringing reliability and quality to customers in the region.
Connecting customers to global markets
When asked about the solution, Frank Tetrel, spokesperson for MSC France, said: “This service delivers on many levels for our clients in the food and beverage industry for which Bordeaux is so famous. Thanks to our knowledge of the region and industry and access to our global network and first-class equipment, our customers are assured better transit times, better security and first-class quality of service, all whilst improving the carbon footprint of their cargo supply chain. This adds a great deal of value for them and supports our ocean service offering perfectly, connecting them with key markets such as Australia and New Zealand, the USA and South Africa quickly and efficiently.”
Rail transport provides an attractive alternative for customers seeking to reduce the carbon footprint of their supply chain and has been a recent focus of the European Commission’s Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy. As part of MSC’s ongoing efforts to decarbonise its logistics activities on sea and land, we are pleased to offer solutions that leverage intermodality as well as helping customers to shift cargo from road to rail wherever possible.
A specially trained sales force and an expert operations team have made the first five years of the Bordeaux Rail Shuttle a roaring success and we’re excited to see where it goes in the years to come.
Find out more about MSC’s intermodal solutions.
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