The Swiss Federal Office of Transport announced today that In the first half of 2026, railways transported 12.33 million of tonnes of goods across the Alps, with an increase in +3.1% compared to the first half of last year, which was however, lower than that of road transport, which in the former Six months of this year with 5.79 million tons marked a increase of +7.5%. Therefore, the share of rail in freight traffic has decreased slightly to 68%, 0.9 percentage points lower than in the first half of 2015 2025.

The Office specified that in the first half of 2026 it will be the road transport and rail transport benefited of the positive economic trend, with an economic situation European - especially Italian and German - slightly improving after years of stagnation, and an overall growing market This is accompanied by a recovery in foreign trade flows. In addition, it specified that rail freight traffic along the axis North-South, however, continues to suffer inconvenience due to the numerous construction sites underway on railway lines, especially in Germany, with an improvement in the situation that is expected only in starting from 2030, while the interventions announced for 2027-2029 on the Rhine line and on the Lötschberg-Simplon axis on the contrary, risk putting pressure on the slight recovery observed in the first half of 2026.

The crux therefore - the Office noted - remains reliability of construction sites along the north-south axis: in the first half of this year Only 45.7% of unaccompanied combined trains are arrived on time, with a delay of between 0 and 30 minutes, a figure almost unchanged compared to 45.5% of the same 2025 period. If the large delays, exceeding three hours, are slightly decreased from 33.4% to 30.6%, cases remain critical extremes: in the second quarter of 2026, one in five trains in north-south direction reached the destination in over 12 hours of delay. The use of the available paths also remains well below theoretical capacity: the Gotthard was occupied at 40.1% (in increase) and the Lötschberg-Simplon to 26.3% (down sharply compared to 45.8% in 2025). Rail transport penalized was also the suppression, last December, of the rolling motorway service on the Fribourg-Novara route ( of 9 December 2025).

With regard to road transport, in the first half of 2015 this year, 511 thousand trips of trucks through the Alps, 7.2% more than in the same period in 2025 equal to about 34 thousand additional trips. All the passes have marked increases: the Simplon has recorded the increase more marked (+10.3%), followed by the Great St. Bernard (+9.3%), from the Gotthard (+7.2%) and the San Bernardino (+4.5%). Traffic has been partly penalized by events meteorological conditions, in particular since the repeated closure in February of the Simplon Pass due to avalanche danger.

On the On the railway front, in the first six months of 2026 the trend is was very uneven between the two axes: while the Gotthard gained +8.4%, with about 780 thousand tons more, the Lötschberg-Simplon axis fell by -15.3% losing about 410 thousand tons having been penalized by the total closure, between the end of May and the end of July, of the Kehrtunnel tunnel between Iselle and Varzo, to which are added the interventions on the east tube of the Simplon tunnel. By as a result, the Gotthard's share of rail freight traffic has risen to 81.4% (+4 percentage points), while the French that of the Simplon fell to 18.6%.

The Office also announced that in the first half of 2026 There have been significant shifts between the rail transport active on the transalpine axis. SBB Cargo International remains the market leader and gains ground by rising to the 44.1% (+7.2 percentage points); BLS Cargo, despite losing 6.1 points, maintains second place with 20.6%; DB Cargo moves to third place with 16.4% (+11.6 points), while SBB Cargo slipped to fourth place with a clear decline to 7.1% (-10.2 points).

Highlighting that in the first half of 2026 traffic on road has grown faster than the one on rail, the Federal Office noted that if the growth of the traffic should continue at the same pace, by the end of the 2026 the number of truck trips through the Alps could return to cross, for the first time in a long time, the threshold of million.