Austrian Railways (ÖBB) has presented plans for a direct intermodal rail connection with China, through ICA Intercontainer Austria, majority-owned by ÖBB’s freight arm Rail Cargo Austria (RCA)
The announcement follows closely on the announcement by DB AG and its project partners to start a regular weekly container block train service between China and Hamburg next January (WorldCargo News, September 23008, p22).
ICA has teamed up with another Austrian company, Far East Land Bridge Ltd (FELB), which in turn has entered into an agreement with Russian Railways’ intermodal daughter Transcontainer. Other partners in the project are Hungary’s Raaberrail and Chinese Railways.
The plan is to operate a weekly service, with a transit time of 20 days along the 11,000 km route. “We want to offer an alternative to maritime transport with China,” said Robert Gerendas, FELB’s managing director. “The great advantage would be faster transit time. Compared with airfreight it takes longer, but is much less expensive.”
Several destinations will be served on the line of route, and transport in/through Hungary will be arranged by RCA when its planned takeover of MAV Cargo is completed.
“Raaberrail will probably not be involved in the takeover of the MAV Cargo, but we are planning a new cooperation [with Raaberrail],” said RCA Board member Friedrich Macher.
One point advanced in favour of the Austria-China service is that the container train will always run through the same climate zone, which will avoid the risk of cargo spoilage through condensation caused by ambient temperature variations. Start date for the new service has not yet been announced.
