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Poland draws closer to German ports
HHLA Intermodal and its Polzug Intermodal affiliate have created an important addition to Hamburg's hinterland network, the new hub-terminal in Poznan in Western Poland.
Transporting container flows from different seaports, each with several terminals, to customers in Poland and in the C.I.S. is Polzug Intermodal’s strongpoint. Despite daily fluctuations in volume and export/import imbalances, the company offers attractive departure frequencies and transport capacities that can be planned. To achieve this, since the end of 2011, Polzug has run all its services together through its new hub-terminal in Poznan.
The “hub-and-shuttle” system
The “hub-and-shuttle” system means that the containers from German ports are transferred to domestic Polish connecting trains. The same railcars then return again with Polish export cargoes. Individual railcars no longer need to be shunted into trains with specific destinations. This system has been proving itself for years with HHLA’s Metrans subsidiary. The shuttle trains consist of railcar sets optimized for length and load and run back and forth between the ports and the hub. For traction, Polzug uses DB multi-system locomotives that make changes at the border superfluous. These important steps towards “industrialization of the transport chain” facilitate high productivity.
The customers also profit from being able to depend on capacities for planning purposes, and also a transit time between Hamburg and Poznan cut from 18 to 12 hours. The facility erected by HHLA is one of the first private investments in a public terminal in Poland. Apart from Polzug, Kombiverkehr, a Polzug customer for many years, also uses this hub, having its inner-European volumes fed into the Polish intermodal network by Polzug. Apart from the new hub-terminal in Poznan and the facility at Katowice in Southern Poland, already taken into service in mid-2010, HHLA is currently building a new hub in Warsaw.
