A strategic pivot from asphalt to rails
Amazon’s European logistics arm has spent the past three years quietly rewiring its middle-mile network around trains and short-sea feeders. Company planners say the e-commerce giant now runs just over 500 rail- and short-sea lanes on the continent – twice as many as in 2022 – and intends to keep stacking new routes into the timetable through 2028. The environmental driver is clear: European reference data indicate that well-to-wheel emissions for electric or hybrid rail freight are approximately 18 g CO₂ per tonne-kilometre, compared to roughly 62 g CO₂/t-km for a long-haul articulated truck. In other words, shifting a payload from asphalt to rails can halve its carbon footprint, even before considering any first- or last-mile electrification.
Paris – Lyon goes high-speed
The headline act in 2025 is a dedicated parcel cabin on passenger TGVs between Paris-Bercy and Lyon Part-Dieu, launched on 14 May 2025 in partnership with SNCF subsidiary Hexafret. Six days a week, baggage-car staff load around 2,000 parcels – everything from books to beauty products – into cages that slot neatly into the train’s existing luggage bay. The 470 km sprint is scheduled at 2 hours and 18 minutes, eight hours faster than the same journey by truck on the A6 motorway. At today’s frequency, that translates to about 624,000 parcels a year. Using a conservative average parcel weight of 1.5 kg, Amazon reduces about 20 t of CO₂ annually compared to a diesel tractor-trailer. While the absolute savings are modest, the project demonstrates that high-speed passenger corridors can be repurposed for small-parcel freight without altering the customer timetable.
Britain’s electrified backbone
Across the Channel, Amazon’s first full-train contract on the 25 kV West Coast Main Line signalled a step change in scale. Containers loaded in central Scotland roll south overnight to rail-connected fulfillment centers in the English Midlands, where parcels are inducted into the sorting system before breakfast. The company expects more than 20 million items to ride the corridor during 2025 – roughly 30,000 t of inventory – eliminating well over 12 million truck-kilometres and about 660 t CO₂ in the process. The corridor also carries a resilience bonus: winter storms that regularly close stretches of the M6 motorway have far less impact on double-tracked, electrified steel rails.
Trans-Alpine muscle
Moving heavier, palletised cargo, Amazon established two fixed intermodal corridors:
- Duisburg – Pomezia: three round-trips a week, threading Germany’s Ruhr district to Rome’s coastal logistics belt.
- Herne – Verona: six round-trips a week – 12 trains in total – linking northern Italy’s fashion hub with German distribution parks.
At full utilisation, these flows can subtract up to 9,000 t CO₂ per year, according to Mercitalia’s verified calculations, because they displace long-distance diesel trucking through the Brenner and Gotthard passes – routes notorious for congestion and steep gradients that exacerbate fuel consumption.
Crunching the carbon dividend
Adding together the audited Mercitalia savings with Amazon’s estimates for the UK and French lanes yields a programme-level cut of roughly 9,700 t CO₂ a year. That is approximately equivalent to the emissions of 6,000 diesel delivery vans over the same period, and it arrives three years ahead of Amazon’s interim 2030 target to halve the carbon intensity of each customer order.
What comes next
On the drawing board are further high-speed links, with Marseille-Paris and Madrid-Barcelona being front-runners, and heavier intermodal trains that would extend the rail grid into Poland and the Czech Republic. Executives aim for one-third of Amazon’s intra-European transfers to travel by rail or sea by 2028. Supporting that shift, a €300 million capital pot is earmarked for electric trucks and cargo bikes that will handle the first and final 50 kilometres of each journey, ensuring the green gains made on the main haul are not forfeited on feeder legs.
From a standing start barely five years ago, Amazon’s European rail portfolio is beginning to look like a genuine alternative spine for e-commerce logistics – faster than conventional trucking on some corridors, cleaner on almost all of them, and increasingly large enough to matter in carbon-accounting terms.