Woippy-Mannheim: Constructing and deconstructing proximity in a border situation. An innovative bi-national pail freight service and its limits between France and Germany (2000-2014)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Missing links and technical interoperability prevail usually when explaining the lack of European integration in rail freight activities. The case of the successful but soon interrupted connection set by DB-Schenker and Fret SNCF from 2003 to 2009 between two main rail terminals Woippy (France) and Mannheim (Germany) highlights other decisive drivers for inter-connecting two national offers into a common service. Why did it failed? A first explanation could be the decision taken by the European Commission to maintain at all costs the principle of competition instead of tolerating cooperation between rail monopolies. A second and more convincing explanation underlines the strategic change undergone by one of the partners. The rapid decline of Fret SNCF’s activities in that period led its virtual withdrawing from the wagonload offer on domestic market. This strategic choice made it impossible to continue such a service on an international scale, leading to an end to the bi-national collaboration. The understanding of the vanished Woippy-Mannheim system is also an opportunity to analyze different ways an international border can be managed by a rail service by mobilizing the concept of proximity understood in its territorial and organizational and strategic components. Finally, rail freight traffic is increasingly linked with the hinterland densification of major ports of the Northern range which are based on shuttles and full load train and less demand for marshalling activities. Dans le contexte d’intégration européenne de l’offre ferroviaire, la question de la disponibilité des infrastructures et de la compatibilité technique du matériel roulant est régulièrement évoquée comme un frein majeur à l’interconnexion des réseaux nationaux. L’exemple du service régulier mis en place de 2003 à 2009 par la DB-Schenker et Fret SNCF entre deux grands nœuds ferroviaires, Woippy et Mannheim, permet de mettre en évidence d’autres facteurs souvent négligés mais qui s’avèrent aussi décisifs dans cette perspective : d’abord l’importance de la composante organisationnelle de l’offre qui est susceptible d’adaptation et d’innovation, mais aussi l’évolution des marchés domestiques qui guident encore largement les choix stratégiques des opérateurs. L’évolution de la gestion de la frontière ferroviaire sous ses formes successives permet par ailleurs de questionner la notion de proximité dans sa composante géographique et organisationnelle. Enfin, l’offre ferroviaire elle-même s’inscrit dans une européanisation des trafics qui est de plus en plus étroitement liée à la recomposition des marchés au départ des principaux ports de la rangée nord-européenne, sous forme de navettes ou de trains complets et au détriment de coûteuses opérations de triage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".