With diminishing scope to achieve much competitive advantage through additional quayside operational efficiencies, many of Europe’s leading deep sea container ports are stepping up efforts to secure such an edge by further enhancing their hinterland transport connections.
Most of the most recent investment in that context centres on expanding rail freight facilities as those ports – which include most of the region’s major gateways for Asia-Europe ocean trades – seek to encourage continuation of an already well-established trend for increasing volumes of their inland container movements to be switched from road to more environmentally friendly transport modes.
The influence of competitive pressures when it comes to driving those developments was highlighted in some of the major rail-related news announced during 2016 and accompanying management comments at Europe’s two leading container ports and major hubs for Asian traffic, Rotterdam and Antwerp.
The Dutch gateway of Rotterdam, for example, announced that it would contribute about US$107 million of the projected total US$294 million cost of redirecting the first four kilometres of its important Betuwe rail route – which provides the port with a direct cargo-dedicated connection to the German railway network – to improve the flow of traffic.
The significance of competitive edge considerations when it came to making that decision was confirmed by Ronald Paul, chief operating officer of the Port of Rotterdam Authority. “The connections to the hinterland are essential for the port’s competitive position. That’s why we want to see a solution to the capacity problem.” Completion of the project is currently scheduled for around 2020.
The issue of competitiveness was also mentioned in a statement by Antwerp Port Authority at the end of last year calling for proposals regarding a project to strengthen rail container connections between that Belgian gateway and the major German industrial regions of Rhine-Ruhr and Rhine-Main.
“Analysis of the market share of the various ports in the Hamburg-Le Havre range (northern Europe) shows that regular rail connections are essential for the competitive position of the seaports,” the authority stated.
In an earlier reflection of that point, that authority four years ago established a port intermodal solutions department to collaborate with the private sector in seeking to “improve the position of the port of Antwerp in a systematic, structured way in terms of rail, barge and road transport.”
That department, added the authority, had the resources to provide support in the start-up phase for new links and/or increased frequencies of intermodal services to important destinations in the core hinterland of the port.
In that context, the authority last year announced it was backing three projects involving the development over the following two years of additional rail freight capacity, catering for both conventional and intermodal freight, between the port of Antwerp and Central/Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, Rotterdam, where rail freight facilities include a central Rail Service Centre to handle shuttle trains and combined transport in addition to transfer facilities at many of its individual terminals, is continuing to further strengthen its network of more than 250 weekly intermodal rail services.
One recent example, for instance, saw the start last November of a ‘hybrid’ train service between Rotterdam and Austria operated by Austrian logistics group ILG. The Linz Shuttle, as it is called, transports containers (up to 64 TEUs) into the port and ore back to Austria. Currently, the frequency is weekly but ILG recently stated that it expected to increase that operation to “at least three weekly runs” from April.
Another potential development for Rotterdam later this year could be a significant expansion of the China-Netherlands rail shuttle service launched in mid-2016 with a weekly frequency on a Chengdu-Tilburg-Rotterdam routing. Subsequently, the companies behind that development, Chinese rail operator CDiRS and Dutch partner RailPort Brabant, indicated that their intention was to increase that frequency to five times a week by late this year.
Another current example of significant new rail-based hinterland container transport development on the European port scene is provided by Bremenports, the port management company for the German gateway of Bremen/Bremerhaven.
Speaking in late December, company managing director Robert Howe reported that construction work on a US$32 million project to expand the Imsumer Deich storage track complex at Bremerhaven’s Überseehafen facility, which includes doubling the number of parallel tracks to 16, was “on schedule.” Expanding on that last point, Bremenports said if weather during the current winter remained mild, those new tracks, which will each be the length of a full train, could go into operation at the end of this year. “The expanded storage track facilities at Imsumer Deich will be used primarily for the transport of containers,” it added.
Further general expansion of hinterland rail transport is also a key objective for Germany’s largest container port and Asian trade gateway, Hamburg, which saw its railway business unit, Hamburg Port Railway, achieve a 2% increase in container traffic during the first half of 2016 to hit almost 1.2 million TEUs. With that rail traffic expected to continue increasing, Hamburg Port Railway last year called for a nationwide expansion of the rail network for train lengths of 740 metres.
“The infrastructure in the Port of Hamburg as well as the large terminals is able to handle trains with a length of 740 metres,” explained Port Railway director Harald Kreft. “However, the network bottlenecks in the hinterland – especially towards Prague (Czech Republic) and Leipzig (eastern Germany) – lead to many short trains competing for the already scarce routes. A network that is consistently expanded to 740 metres would mean a double-digit efficiency gain for our already heavily utilized trains.”
Elsewhere in Europe, several other leading ports for Asian deep sea container traffic have recently bolstered their hinterland rail freight connections. At the end of last year, for example, Le Havre in northern France (part of the HAROPA group, which also includes the ports of Paris and Rouen) saw combined transport operator Ferovergne add a third weekly service to its year-old rail container operation linking that port with a rail logistics platform in Vierzon, central France, which offers connections to/from the Clermont-Ferrand and Loire-sur-Rhône areas.
Meanwhile, in the south of France, combined transport operator Naviland Cargo, a subsidiary of French group SNCF Logistics, late last year started a daily rail link between container terminals at the Mediterranean port of Marseille Fos and the Brittany region in the northwest of the country, via a terminal in Lyon.
“The new railway service will enable economic operators in Brittany to benefit from an alternative logistics solution to road for their pre and post shipments and maritime supplies from Marseille Fos,” the port authority said. Overall, it added, seven combined transport service providers were now operating in that port, serving 26 rail destinations in France and Europe.
By Phil Hastings
Europe Correspondent | London
