Page 32 - Port of Hamburg | Port of Hamburg Magazine 1.2022

■ CONTAINER WORLDS
It’s an ongoing journey
It’s not just in the world’s seaports that everything revolves around the container. Once discharged on the quay, in whatever livery the box goes off inland – whether by rail, truck or inland waterway craft.
Around 300 kilometres of track, almost 2000 week- ly services and 200 freight trains per day make Hamburg the largest rail port in Europe. Almost every second container leaves or arrives in the port by rail. Despite the pandemic, last year railborne freight set a record: About
2,800,000 TEU were han-
dled, an advance of eight
percent in containers trans-
ported. For the first time,
environment-friendly rail
took a larger share of hinter-
land traffic than trucking.
Making that possible were Hamburg Port Railway, responsible for the entire infrastructure, rail opera- tors, and service providers like HHLA subsidiary Metrans Rail.
A GREEN MEANS OF TRANSPORT
For Peter Kiss, CEO of Metrans, one thing is certain: “With other technical solutions as yet insufficiently ma- tured, in present conditions it’s only by rail that freight traffic can function in climate-friendly fashion.” One fig-
ure impressively confirms this verdict: ‘Rail transport emits 110 times less CO2 than truck- ing. Under the HHLA umbrella, Metrans aims to go one step further and to be completely climate-neutral by 2040, or to secure a balance between car-
bon intake and emissions. “Transfer of traffic from road to rail is a crucial lever for improving the climate. Cli- mate-friendly logistics belong to the future, so we aim for CO2-neutral transport,” explains Kiss. For example,
32 | Port of Hamburg Magazine | June 2022
More than 50 percent
of hinterland traffic in the Port of Hamburg is transported by rail.
© HHLA/Raetzke