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Ten years after being highlighted, the concept of trinomial of interconnection relating to integration of the transport systems in Europe deserves a development insofar as such the amount of research on the interconnection processes and the number of trinomial knew of multiple development. The article first of all reconsiders the nature of the conceptas a place of articulation of heterogeneous networks, its structural components and its essential elements of tionality, bases of distinction of the two types of trinomial, one complete and the other integral one. It then tries to understand the reasons of the emergence of such intermodal nodes, the factors of explanation concerning economic, territorial or institutional logics. But, in front of the extent of the field of research thus traversed by several teams and vis-a-vis the diversity of the studies undertaken on the topic of the interconnection, necessary realignments as well as the integration of the concept in a widened corpus are essential then. Passing finally from the local scale on a European scale, the author endeavours to peel the process of diffusion of this innovation, in his diachronic dimension and his spatial extension, using some maps, by identifying the elements of the process, by breaking up the forms of the propagation and by describing phenomena of barrier.

In developing countries, the railway, which was inherited of the colonial times, is still often limited to a few isolated lines. But, a systematic analysis of rail emerging networks allows us to discover, beyond an apparent confusion, some essential spatial trends in the specific networks structure as well as in the particular process of their development: arborescences from a structuring axis, « combs » by transversal links, stars through convergence to a meeting point. But, in most cases, rail transport is still not very coherent and barely efficient.

Domestic air transport was deregulated in several stages between 1987 and 1997. This significant evolution gave place in France to transformations of networks awaited (generalization of the structures in «hub and spoke», partnerships between national and regional companies), but also to the emergence of an offensive and original competition on the transverse connections (between French regions themselves or between French regions and foreign destinations), offering a real alternative to the parisian airports. The promotion of provincial airports like Clermont-Ferrand, Montpellier, etc. as hubs creates true opportunity effects for cities which were up to that point only connected to the capital. But the experiment of Saint-Etienne (the first closing of a hub in 1999) shows that nothing on the matter is irreversible. The phenomenon was recovered by the two largest competitors (the Air France and SAir groups), which lets forecast new reorganizations in the short and medium term, which will not result inevitably by closings but rather in a hiérarchisation and a specialization of small hubs.