Today in Hamburg UIC and the International Freight Forwarders’ Association (FIATA) successfully opened the 4th edition of the Market Place Seminar entitled “Rail Hinterland – efficient connections to the world”, with the support of DB Schenker and HHLA.

Mr Oliver Sellnick, Chairman of Market Place Seminar 2011, welcomed over 150 people from 20 countries, including railway undertakings, freight forwarders and customers.

Mr Frank Horch, Senator for Economic Affairs, Transport and Innovation of the City of Hamburg, Dr Ivan Petrov of the FIATA-UIC Contact Group, Co-Chairman of FIATA, Mr Heiner Rogge, General Manager at DSLV, Dr Sebastian Jürgens, Member of the HHLA Executive Board, and Dr Alexander Hedderich, Chairman & CEO of DB Schenker Rail, opened the 4th Market Place Seminar.

Senator Horch welcomed participants to the seminar. Hamburg’s metropolitan region is developing significantly and will soon be home to five million people. The port of Hamburg is becoming increasingly important for Europe and a new port is under development.
This year has already seen a 9.4% increase in transhipment and a 17.4% increase in container traffic, the best figures since the crisis. Proof of growth is evidenced by 4.5 million containers and shows that the future is in hinterland traffic. The EU has yet to give its final approval for the project to build the new port but Senator Horch believes that the work will start very soon.

Dr Sebastian Jürgens pointed out that HHLA, being a vertical integrated company with strong intermodal participation, covers the natural environment of Hamburg: Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, with 76 trains per week travelling to or from these regions. HHLA, which offers a seamless transport chain port-to-door, expects a continued growth of intermodal hinterland.

Dr Alexander Hedderich said that “DB Schenker Rail stands for powerful and reliable rail freight, which meets demand according to the reliability, flexibility and pricing of customers in the combined traffic sector. Preconditions to this are good
cooperation and synchronisation along the whole maritime-seaport-hinterland-chain and a powerful wagon load system such as the backbone of European rail freight.”

Andreas Schulz, Senior Vice-President at DB Intermodal, highlighted the fact that all types of transport have to be reliable in combined transport or else all of them will suffer. In his view, the new step-by-step approach should be adopted, to connect it all as fast as possible, avoiding time wasting, and to expand the time frame (opening terminals 24/7 or carrying out freight operations during the day.)

Finally, one should consider the whole transport chain in order to bring efficiency and satisfy the customer with more cooperation and partnerships.

The Market Place Seminar will go on to address the following subjects:

• New business designs for inland terminals
• Creating customer value with multimodal transport solutions
• Infrastructure: from being a bottle neck to becoming an enabler of combined traffic