Rosyth looks to the future 14


Forth Ports’ Rosyth in eastern Scotland is currently very busy handling


construction for the


new Forth Road Bridge but is already looking ahead to business opportunities aſter the new crossing is completed in 2016. The area that is currently being used as a base for the building of the new bridge will eventually be freed for other, commercial customers, says manager, Fiona Doherty. Doherty, who also manages


Forth’s Leith and Burntisland is, incidentally, believed to be the UK’s first lady port manager. Rosyth is, in a sense, Scotland’s


newest commercial port. Until Forth Ports bought it in 1998, the entire port area was a minesweeper base. (Babcock, which bought the other section of the port from the MoD still uses it for building and refitting aircraſt carriers.) Rosyth’s transformation started in 2001, when it became the terminal for the Superfast passenger and freight fast ferry service to Zeebrugge, Scotland’s only regular direct ro ro link to


the Continent. Eventually, the recession and surging fuel prices took their toll on the Superfast service, but then Norfolk Line stepped in with a conventional multipurpose ferry before selling out to DFDS, which now operates a three days a week freight-only ferry. Freight volumes on the DFDS


service are still strong, says Fiona Doherty. “Scotland is a net exporter so, unlike some other ferry services in the UK, there is loaded volume in and out.” Other major customers of the


port include cable manufacturer Oceaneering, which currently builds up 5,000 tonne reels of umbilical cable at Rosyth for the offshore industry but is planning to upgrade to even bigger 7,500-tonne


reels once quay


strengthening is complete. Another big port-side user is


265x170_EUROTUNNEL_FBJ.pdf 1 14/06/2013 11:40:22


Scot Timber, which imports wood to make into pallets; it is in fact one of the biggest suppliers to the entire UK freight industry. Other major traffics include grain, scrap


Issue 7 2013 Freight Business Journal


///NEWS NEWS ROUNDUP FORWARDING & LOGISTICS


Kuehne + Nagel has appointed Marcus Bennett as national manager for its UK organisation. He succeeds Yngve Ruud who will move to the company’s Western Europe headquarters in Hamburg. Bennet is a 24-year KN veteran, and became national manager, Ireland ten years ago.


and road salt. The Forth Crossing Bridge


Consortium reached agreement with Forth Ports in 2011 to use Rosyth as the construction base for the new Forth Road Bridge, which is being built to the west of the existing bridges and is scheduled to become the main road link across the Firth of Forth from 2016. (The existing road bridge is essentially worn out and will be used only for buses and cyclists.) The caissons for the new bridge are complete (involving,


incidentally, the world’s largest concrete pour at 70,000cu m) and the next stage of the project will be to coat the 25-tonne metal bridge segments in concrete at an on-port batching plant and float them, now weighing 750t, out into the Firth and assemble them. At the moment, the port


is


extremely busy, says Doherty, although great efforts


have


gone into ensuring that existing customers are not disturbed. “Hats off to the operations team, the whole operation has worked extremely well,” she adds.


Retired freight forwarder Christopher Tappin is back in the UK to complete his 33-year sentence for selling banned batteries to Iran. He is currently in Wandsworth Prison near his home and family in Orpington, Kent, but had endured six weeks in New York’s notorious Metropolitan Correctional Center while his extradition was approved, said his lawyer.


Logistics company GAC is extending its agreement with the OMA network in West Africa to include the Ivory Coast. It follows the country’s return to stability in late 2011 and its rapid re-establishment as one of the world’s leading cocoa producers. GAC-OMA has a main office in Abidjan and is also present in Benin, Ghana and Togo, while the GAC Group itself is present in Nigeria, Angola and Congo.


Yusen Logistics Indonesia has opened a 16,700sq m warehouse at Jababeka, in the suburbs of Jakarta, boosting the group’s total space in the country to 90,000sq m. Jababeka is adjacent to Cikarang Dry Port and is conveniently located near to major industrial complexes. The area is popular with Japanese companies, mainly in the automotive sector.


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