UIC and the International Freight Forwarders’ Association (FIATA) successfully held the 4th edition of the Market Place Seminar entitled “Rail Hinterland – efficient connections to the world”, with the support of DB Schenker and HHLA, on 27 and 28 October 2011 in Hamburg.
Mr Oliver Sellnick, Chairman and moderator of Market Place Seminar 2011, welcomed over 150 participants from 20 countries, including railway undertakings, freight forwarders and customers.
As Mr Hurtienne from Hamburg Port Authority explained, Hamburg is the third largest European port and the first German port, but is the most important “rail port” in Europe with a 36% rail share (Rotterdam=11%).
Mr Libor Lochman from CER explained that railway undertakings fear the increase of interfaces that bring new transaction costs. His expectations are now corridor-oriented. He insisted on the need to establish new rules for capacity allocation and, even in this climate of crisis in Europe, governments have to be pushed to invest in the harmonisation of lines.
Dr Sandvoß from DB Netz presented the example of German infrastructure and the challenges of hinterland traffic: it is expected that growth in rail traffic will continue to be generated mainly through freight transport. Therefore an efficient hinterland connection has to be preserved and developed. The key challenge is to provide capacity building and investment funds. 36 new and upgrading measures ensure the capacity needed until 2019.
Mr Vincenzo Carpinelli from UIC gave the example of Genoa’s port: railways are vital for Mediterranean ports to reach Europe. So strategies are developed to improve the capacity when there is a bottleneck: control of time, signalling and infrastructure. New investments are again necessary to eliminate these bottlenecks: splitting freight traffic from passenger traffic for example. It is expected that rail traffic will overtake road traffic by 2020.
Mr Oliver Sellnick concluded in these words: “it was interesting to see from the shipping members that they are also trying to take more of an interest in understanding their role in transportation changes, in how they can improve their operations in other areas, and also identified the importance of reliability.”
