‘We’ve trained everybody to understand you can’t bring continental wagons into the UK and now we have to untrain them!’
Hanover-Linden Cottbus
Horka
Dollands Moor Barking
Muizen
Calais- Frethun
Aachen-West Wegliniec Wroclaw
was built with the foresight to let continental gauge wagons come through and HS1 finally fulfills that. But we’ve trained everybody to understand you can’t bring continental wagons into the UK and now we have to untrain them! We can now go as far as Barking, but we’d like to have the infrastructure to go further.’ Commodities carried on the Polish service so far
include manufactured parts and components for the automotive sector, as well as food and other goods for the retail market. ‘We were happy with a 90 per cent load on that first
five of its Class 92 locomotives, mainly to install in-cab signalling capabilities. Although some EU funding was available to support this, DB Schenker has had to contribute several million pounds of its own. ‘We applied for Marco Polo funding to help us do
that because, once it’s done, it’s for everybody,’ explains Thauvette. ‘Anyone else who’s got a Class 92 can get it modified once it’s approved.’ Is there a timescale for the company to re-coup this
investment? ‘It’s like investing in the future. You can’t always
count in days or months, but I think, over the next few years, the goal is to get the traffic up on HS1. Our aim is to modify five or six Class 92s.’ Using the Channel Tunnel at all has always been
problematic. Initial forecasts of freight usage fell far short of expectations when it first opened. Most freight operators have been put off by steep access charges and the French bureaucracy that has to be negotiated in order to access the railway at the other side. However, GB Railfreight has now been bought by Eurotunnel subsidiary Europorte, with the intention of running its own cross-Channel services, as well as making the tunnel more attractive to other operators. Has GB Railfreight’s involvement made the Tunnel any easier to use? ‘It changes nothing for us in the UK – sometimes
GB Railfreight is a partner, sometimes we compete. C’est la vie. I think its involvement in Europorte will help to broaden people’s minds as to what’s required for the tunnel because they will encounter the same hurdles we are meeting.’ But, he adds, using the Tunnel is never really
straightforward, with operating costs remaining high. DB Schenker currently has 16 trains going each way through the Tunnel weekly, which it wants to expand as quickly as it can. ‘What’s interesting with HS1 is that it wasn’t a priority to get freight on it for a long time. It’s always been an impediment for the UK that you need a different type of wagon if you’re coming from the mainland. The tunnel
PAGE 20 DECEMBER 2011
train. We’re looking to lengthen the train by stopping off in Germany. Then we’ll have a 750-metre train and that would be at the limit of what’s permitted, so we’ll begin a second service. By having the first train as a showcase, we can have the second service full before long. We’ve been running trains from Italy for a long time, so we know it’s do-able.’ A second service from Poland may go via the
Netherlands, with the aim of dropping off and collecting boxes there too. Thauvette would like to increase the number of DB Schenker trains using the tunnel from the current 16 return services a week to 22 over the next year. ‘We’re looking at additional traffic coming from
Spain too,’ says Thauvette. ‘It’s a nice distance from Spain, over 1,000km, and there’s a lot of trade. It’s steel; it’s intermodal; we have trains going to Italy, Germany; we have clay, we have automotive parts and finished vehicles, mineral water and liquor. So 16 return moves and we want to add six more. We want to run more traffic from Spain, more fresh products. For Poland we’re looking at, by February, having a second train, but we don’t want to bite off more than we can chew.’ At the moment, most of the boxes arriving at Barking
from the Continent are for distribution in the London area. But if they are to continue their journey further north by rail, they would have be transferred to smaller wagons to fit the tighter loading gauge that is the UK standard. A few key routes have been ‘gauge enhanced’
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