The port of Hamburg is very popular with Central European railway operators. “There are more trains to and from Austria than ever before,” reported the board of Hamburg Marketing (HHM) on May 7 at their 41st Hamburg port evening in Vienna. Around 250 guests from Austrian shipping companies, freight forwarders, logistics providers, railway operators, container trucking companies and inland ports attended the event at the winery Wolff in Neustift am Walde (Vienna).
The main reason for the positive development on the rail is the recent shift of 5 North America trades from Bremerhaven to Hamburg. Their annual throughput volume is estimated at 500,000 TEU.
For the railway operators this has the advantage of changed train rotations. In Hamburg they can now combine outbound shipments to North America with container shipments from the Far East on their trains. The implementation of the time-consuming and costly triangular traffic is thus eliminated.
Currently, 90 weekly block trains connect the terminals in Austria with the quays in the Port of Hamburg. There are departures to and from Wolfurt, Hall in Tyrol, Salzburg, Linz, Enns, Krems on the Danube and Vienna with connections to national and international transports.
Also thanks to the deepening of the Elbe, which shall be completed by 2021, Alexander Till, Head of the HHM office in Vienna gives a positive outlook for Austria. At the port evening, he was anticipating an increase in container traffic in 2019. Last year 266,000 TEU were handled, with 98 per cent of all transports are handled by rail.
