Moselle Express: a ‘greener’ route to Trier
Many people in the Netherlands know Trier for its delicious wine. But Germany’s oldest city is also a busy hub of industrial activity. Every day, hundreds of containers make their way from Rotterdam to the birth town of Karl Marx and vice versa. By ship, truck and – since close to two years now – also by rail, on the Moselle Express. Yusen Logistics and Ocean Network Express (ONE) were among the very first companies to use the new rail shuttle. ONE’s Johan Pijpers: “Lower CO2 emissions, swift delivery to the client’s location and efficient re-use of empty containers.”
The German company Am Zehnhoff-Söns has been operating a rail shuttle between the RWG and ECT Delta terminals on Rotterdam’s Maasvlakte and the multimodal terminal in Trier since January 2017. Every week, the global logistics company Yusen Logistics transports between 40 and 50 containers with industrial products from the port of Rotterdam to a regular client in Luxemburg. “We used to transport them with trucks, but it actually doesn’t make much sense to consistently choose road haulage for a distance of 400 km,” says Yusen Logistics Branch Manager René Braemer. “Particularly when you take heavy traffic and CO2 emissions into account – and on top of this, the containers often come back empty. That’s why we went in search of an intermodal solution.”
