Maersk, port lobby group call for Felixstowe rail link funding
A senior executive of Maersk in the United Kingdom and a lobby group of the ports of Felixstowe, Harwich and Ipswich have called for funding for a rail link program recently postponed by British authorities.
The rail link between Felixstowe, in the southeast of England, and Nuneaton, in the Midlands, would allow the carriage of 9 foot 6 inch high maritime containers and provide additional capacity.
“For the present and future of the Haven ports… it is essential that the Felixstowe to Nuneaton scheme is reinstated in the strategic rail plan and that funds are found for it in the 2004 comprehensive spending review,” the Haven Gateway Partnership lobby group said in a statement. The group said that the rail link “was identified as the most important rail freight route in the U.K. in a report for the Transport and Energy Commission of the European Union.”
The group argued that the link upgrading is needed to provide an alternative route avoiding London, and, possibly later, substantial additional capacity for up to 32 container trains a day.
Between them, the Haven ports of Felixstowe, Harwich and Ipswich handle nearly 3 million TEUs annually, representing more than 40 percent of all containers through U.K. ports. The ports also move about 20 percent of their containers by rail on 18 container train services a day.
Under the current rail links of the Great Eastern Main Line to London, the North London line and the West Coast Main Line, the maximum height of containers that can be handled is 8 foot 6 inches.
But the lobby group said that the international trend is towards 9 foot 6 inches containers, which currently account for 25 percent of all containers, and could increase to 50 percent by 2010.
The group also warned that the existing Great Eastern Main Line and North London line are not sufficient to handle increasing volumes linked to the expansion of the ports of Felixstowe and Harwich.
Capt. Stephen Bracewell, operations director for the U.K. and Ireland at Maersk Sealand, backed the port lobby group. “Rail offers considerable economies of scale and is labor efficient,” said Bracewell, who will take over as chief executive of Harwich Haven Authority in February.
“One train driver regularly hauls 40 of our containers,” he said. “This is of crucial importance as the supply of lorry drivers is falling at a time when the miles they can legally drive is about to fall as a requirement of the (European) working time directive.”