Motorail
Car shuttle trains usually operate over relatively short distances, on lines passing through a rail tunnel and connecting two places not easily accessible to each other by road.
[1] Most of the car-carrier wagons are running on a daily basis all-year-round to car terminals located in Austria (Vienna, Graz, Villach, Feldkirch, Innsbruck) and Germany (Hamburg, Düsseldorf).
In addition, ÖBB nightjets from Vienna are serving one car terminal in Italy (Livorno) during the summer season.
Another motorail service abandoned by DB Autozug was taken over by BTE, a German rail tourism company, which is affiliated with the US-based Railroad Development Corporation (RDC).
BTE took over the DB Autozug connection between Hamburg and Lörrach, offering all-year-round motorail services 1-4 times a week.
[6] After the bankruptcy of Arenaways in 2014 due to massively manipulated rules by state-owned Trenitalia to exclude the competitor from the market, all services were withdrawn.
There were motorail services, called AutoSlaapTrein, which ran in the summer months from 's-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch) in the Netherlands to Koper in Slovenia, to Alessandria and Livorno in Italy, and Frejus and Avignon in the South of France.
Another Dutch company, the travel agency Treinreiswinkel, continued the Autoslaaptrein in May 2015 with a connection between Germany (Düsseldorf) and Verona.
The only motorail train of Turkey is running between Villach/Austria and Edirne/Turkey mainly for the Turkish workers abroad, passing through Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria.
[14] In Switzerland, several car shuttle trains run, called Autoverlad; no motorail services exist.
British Rail operated Motorail services from 1955 serving various destinations, but had discontinued them by the time the state-owned body was wound up in the mid-1990s.
Several overnight "car train" (カートレイン) services were operated by the Japanese National Railways and its successor JR Group between 1985 and 1999.
There were a number of problems with these services which contributed to their eventual cancellation, including fairly severe size restrictions on the vehicles that could be transported, lack of on-board dining facilities, revenue sharing issues between regional operating companies following the privatization of JR, and competition with both long-distance car ferries and combination air/rental car travel products.
The Ontario Northland Railway's Auto Carrier Service has several chain cars that carry vehicles from Cochrane to Moosonee.
It also allows palletized freight, personal effects, household goods, groceries, building material, and special vehicles (ATVs, UTVs, snowmobiles, boats, and canoes).
The Polar Bear Express is a popular service for those living in communities near the James Bay as no all season road exists to link Moosonee with the rest of Ontario.
In Chile, EFE (Empresa de los Ferrocarriles del Estado) operated a service called "Autotren"[20] between Santiago and Temuco.
Amtrak operates their dedicated Auto Train between Lorton, Virginia (near Washington, D.C.) and Sanford, Florida (near Orlando), a distance of 855 miles (1,376 km).
Special vehicles such as small trailers, limousines, jet-skis, trikes, and chopper motorcycles may be brought on for an extra fee.
[21] Currently this service is provided only on the Tren Patagonico (Patagonian Train), which connects Viedma on the Atlantic coast with Bariloche in the Andes covering a distance of 800 km, and on the Buenos Aires-Mar Del Plata line, connecting the capital of the country with the Atlantic coast in a distance of 400 km.
