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Issue 4 2015 - Freight Business Journal


///NEWS


Tilbury gains new link to north-east Spain


JSV Logistic is to launch weekly a container service between the Spanish port of Pasaia and Tilbury’s London Container Terminal (LCT) on 23 April. The service will be operated by JSV’s FAHER Maritime subsidiary and will also include Antwerp in its rotation. Pasaia is in north-eastern Spain, close to San Sebastian and the French frontier. JSV Logistic said it expects


to transport containerised steel and paper products to the UK, along with chemicals, car parts and perishables which would normally be trucked through France and the Channel Tunnel. Short-sea shipping operator OPDR and X-Press Feeder are


Calais plans Spain/UK ro-ro-rail link A subsidiary of the French


railways plans to launch a trailer-carrying rail service from the Spanish-French border to Calais by the end of the year, it was revealed at the Multimodal conference in Birmingham on 30 April. VIIA Britanica, which is backed by the SNCF Logistics arm of the French railways, will launch a twice-daily ‘ro-ro-rail’ service linking Le Boulou with Calais, connecting with cross- Channel ferries to Dover. The train service will be similar


meanwhile expanding their service from Bilbao to Tilbury from two to three vessels. Two will be operated by X-Press Feeders and one by OPDR. The service will run as two loops with one departure per week. The full service rotation will now be Tilbury – Rotterdam – Gijon – Bilbao – Le Havre – Rotterdam – Bilbao – Tilbury (LCT). Tilbury’s London Container


Terminal (LCT) currently handles other OPDR services including the Iberian Peninsula, Canary Islands and North Africa


plus the recently launched service connection from Agadir to the UK and North Continent. Managing director of X-Press


Feeder, Paul Murphy, said: “Our customers comprising deep sea lines as well as short sea intra Europe operators are looking for frequency and schedule reliability. Teaming up with OPDR – a long standing partner in Europe – allows us to deliver this and simultaneously open a new corridor for our clients to and from Tilbury, a strategically valuable port for the South East of England.”


to the existing Lorryrail service from Le Boulou to Luxembourg, which has been operating since 2008. It will be able to carry unaccompanied standard-height and mega trailers on the French railways’ generous loading-gauge and will tap into strong latent demand for a rail link to Calais and the UK, predicted VIIA sales manager, Daniel Lebreton. The trains will operate to a new terminal within the port of Calais, allowing trailers to be shuttled to the ferry terminal by internal tugs to be moved to Dover, again unaccompanied. Special wagons with


rotatable platforms would allow simultaneous loading of trailers without cranes, so normal


units could be used; traditional piggyback operation involving cranes requires special trailers with strengthened liſting points. It is however a different system from the Cargobeamer operation that has been mooted for a separate development in Calais, in the proposed Calais Premier logistics park. Lebreton explained the


rational behind the new service: “Calais is also a point of departure as well as a destination. We anticipate that the UK will be 90- 95% of the market.” The trains would carry 80 trailers a day in each direction, he added. They will operate from Le Boulou to Calais in 22 hours, a timing that could only be achieved by road transport by using double- manned trucks, he said, adding: “We feel also that there may be demand from Calais to services other than Dover, perhaps to the Thames or Humber.” Other rail services could also


be added, such as an east-west link to Poznan in Poland or a route to Trieste – which could also carry trailers arriving by ferry from Turkey to the UK. Lebreton anticipated that


major volumes for the new service would come from the


automotive industry and from the Spanish produce growers. The proposed journey times would


be well within the


operating envelope of on-board diesel-powered trailer reefer units, he predicted. Units returning from to Spain


could be reloaded in Calais if there were no cargoes available from the UK, he added. He said that perhaps 10% of


freight traffic carried on ferries from Calais to Dover could use the rail connection rather than road; this is roughly in line with the percentage claimed by Stena Line for its connecting rail services into Rotterdam. According to VIIA’s publicity, the service could handle around 500,000 road journeys a year by 2020, each cutting CO2 emissions by 80% compared with all-road journeys. It could also ease problems with recruiting long-distance truck drivers, as international road journeys would be replaced by short shuttles to and from Dover, Lebreton suggested. Special measures would


also be taken to ensure that trains were not stopped in or near Calais, to prevent illegal immigrants from climbing about UK-bound trailers.


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