There is little doubt that European waterways are not fulfilling their potential and that considerably more freight could be moved by inland vessels and barges on rivers, such as the Danube, Elbe, Seine and Rhone-Soane.

Even the Rhine can be used to move substantially more cargo than its current tonnage of approximately 330 Mtpa, including over 15.4 Mt (over 3M TEU) of containerised cargo. In all, the Rhine is believed to account for about 60% of all cargo (550 Mt) moved by inland waterway in the European Union. For container traffic, the river is even more dominant.

The Danube is hugely underutilised, with only about 38 Mt of cargo transported on the artery in 2015. In H2 2015, traffic volumes declined as a consequence of generally low water levels, which meant vessels/barges could not be fully loaded on various stretches of the river. 

Five-year plan

A key part of the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine’s (CCNR) Vision 2018 strategy is to achieve traffic growth on the waterway and provide the framework for cargo to shift from other transport modes. The five-year plan puts in place a number of ecological, social and economic programmes that it believes will support the sustainable development of the waterway. However, given the difficult trading conditions that currently persist and the poor state of the EU economy, Vision 2018 is not ignoring the fiscal challenges involved.

At the European Commission level, a new action plan has been launched for the region’s inland waterways. Branded “Naiades II – Towards quality inland waterway transport”, its aim is to “create the proper framework and conditions for inland waterways transport to be wellgoverned, efficient, safe, integrated into the intermodal chain, with quality jobs occupied by a skilled workforce, and adhering to high environmental standards”. 

Research demonstrates that there is huge potential for Europe’s inland waterways and ports. In an analysis of truck journeys of more than 150 km between regions connected by inland waterways or within 100 km of an inland waterway network, over 261 Mt of cargo could potentially be containerised and moved by inland river vessel and/or barge (see table). It could be worth over 26M TEU a year of additional traffic to the network. Huge schemes are afoot including the more than €1B plan to build a canal linking the Seine with the Scheldt – due to be completed in 2019/20.

River navigation is never easy, though, with rising and falling water levels often causing considerable disruption.

The past few months have seen several new services started, quite often in joint ventures, as individual transport companies have looked at:

• Extending the number of ports served.
• Deploying bigger barges.
• Reducing their impact on the environment.
• Offering their customers greater choice.

On 1 July, H&S Container Line, Danser Containerline and Ultra-Brag started a new operation linking Antwerp and Rotterdam with upper Rhine ports, including Basel, Weil, Ottmarsheim, Neubreisach, Strasbourg and Kehl. Additionally,  the group offers a faster rail link between Kehl and Strasbourg and the Benelux ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp and Zeebrugge.

“Our primary aim is to achieve a better concentration of volumes of traffic on the Upper Rhine and optimise calls at the seaports,” explained Thomas Knopf, CEO of partner Ultra-Brag. “It allows all three of us to improve our services 
and to achieve greater levels of efficiency.” 

Basel-based Ultra-Brag is a fully vertically integrated company, when it comes to its Rhine waterway and logistics services. Knopf stressed the significance of the group’s ownership of barges (12 units in the 204 to 336 TEU size  range), train connections and trimodal terminals, which include CSA Andernach and ETK Kehl.

“We have built sites at strategic points, in order to support customers directly and to keep land routes as short as possible,” he said. “We also offer seamless and single-source administration and procedures, which keeps everything simple for the customer.”

Contargo, which is one of the largest companies engaged in the river Rhine barge and freight logistics sectors, with cargo volumes in excess of 2.3M TEU a year, continues to expand its operations. Its network includes 25 terminals capable of handling containers at locations throughout Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.

Rail enhancements

The focus this year has been on enhancing its rail activities, its services to/from upper Rhine ports and on the French river system.

A new company called Contargo Rail Services (CRS) has been set up, with its headquarters in Mannheim.

Andreas Mager, who co-manages CRS with Michael Lückenbach, a veteran of Europe’s rail freight industry who used to work for the Deutsche Bahn group, explained: “We want to make the new company an efficient operator in multimodal combined road/rail transport, and to expand the range of services we offer to/from third party terminals.” Since September, the Dutch group has been scheduling three additional rail services a week between Rotterdam and the upper Rhine ports of Basel and Weil am Rhein.

“This expansion makes us more flexible, and enables us to meet the needs of our customers even more effectively,” said Holger Bochow, managing director of Contargo AG Basel. “We now run six times a week by rail to Rotterdam and three to Antwerp.”

The company has also expanded container handling capacities at several ports, including Frankfurt Osthafen. Several grain silos have been demolished, and an additional 6,000 m2 of storage space has been created for containers.

In general, port authorities, stevedores and terminal managers active on the Rhine have strong investment programmes in place, as they seek to:

• ?Modernise their facilities.
• Raise productivity levels.
• Ensure they have the right equipment and capacity in place for the market’s changing cargo mixes and customers’ requirements.
• ?Meet increasingly tougher environmental regulations being imposed by the EU.
• Enhance their connectivity with other transport modes.
• Offer enhanced logistics and freight processing services.

At the German port of Duisburg, the largest container handling complex on the Rhine with a throughput of close to 3.5M TEU a year, considerable efforts are being made to streamline traffic flows to/from the port (see box story, p36).

The huge Gateway Nord Basel trimodal port project, in which the partners have just submitted their funding application, is also about improving connectivity, particularly for cargo moving north/south via the Rhine waterway and Mediterranean ports. At full build-out, the facility will be capable of processing approximately 400,000 TEU a year (see p38-39).

At the Belgian port of Liège, which is located on the river Meuse, the focus is on adding new equipment as a means of handling its rising cargo volumes more efficiently. This year has seen Terex Port Solutions deliver a diesel-electric Gottwald Model 2 MHC and a Terex Stackace empty handling unit to Liège Container Terminal (LCT). While the MHC has a maximum lifting capacity of 80t, the empty container handling machine can reach one container over six. 

Both pieces of equipment offer LCT additional operating flexibility. The MHC’s higher lifting capacity and longer outreach, compared with the facility’s existing gantry crane, for instance, allows containers to be switched between adjacently moored barges/inland waterway vessels, thus enabling the operator to offer transhipment activities. 

Nicolas Limbioul, general manager of LCT, explained that the catalyst for its growth had been the port’s strategic location between southern Belgium, northern France, western Germany and the North Sea ports of Rotterdam, Antwerp and Zeebrugge, and its range of trimodal facilities. 

“In the past year, our volumes have increased to 40,000 TEU, and, since we are anticipating as many as 70,000 TEU on the waterway and 45,000 TEU by rail for 2016, we decided to order new handling equipment,” he said. “This new
investment will put us in a good position to meet our long-term challenges.”

Outside of the Rhine waterway, opportunities are opening up, especially on the Seine and Rhone Soane rivers in France, the Elbe in Germany and the multi-national Danube river systems. In all cases, considerable sums of money are  being committed to improving navigation, improving wharves and cargo handling facilities, and transforming some of the larger ports into fully fledged logistics and trimodal transport centres.

Polish artery

Elsewhere too, projects are underway, and the decision of the Szczecin and Świnoujście Seaports Authority (SSSA) to join the European Federation of Inland Ports (EFIP), suggests that Poland’s river Oder could become a more important freight artery. The two ports are among the largest in the Baltic region, handling mainly dry bulk, general cargo, such as forest products and steel, ro-ro and agri-commodities. 

Both ports are investing heavily in upgrading their berths and dredging alongside depths so that larger vessels can be handled. Plans are also afoot to substantially raise their container traffic and to assist in the development of the inland river network for all types of cargo. In particular, opportunities exist in using barges to move containerised cargo to/from German cities such as Berlin and Brandenburg. 

“The Szczecin-Świnoujście port complex is the only one in Poland to have access to an inland waterway network, and, as this is regarded by the European Union as the most environment-friendly form of transport, this is an undeniable asset for us,” explained Dariusz Słaboszewski, CEO of SSSA. “We hope that as a member of EFIP we can better promote the huge potential of the shipping capacity of the Oder River which is going to be improved as well.” 

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This complete item is approximately 2000 words in length, and appeared in the October 2016 issue of WorldCargo News, on page 36. To access this issue download the PDF here.