RLL Container Report - 04 June 2014
From: John Keir, Ross Learmont Ltd Email: john.keir@telia.com Date: 04 June 2014
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
With a combined population of more than 25 million, London and Paris constitute the two largest metropolitan areas in the European Union. This was one of the driving forces to link the two capitals via a high-speed rail link connected by the Channel Tunnel. Contrary to many doubters, the high-speed rail connection proved to be a great success. Furthermore, both capital cities are expected to witness a sharp rise in population: London alone is projected to add another million inhabitants in the next decade. To cope with this vast influx of humanity, London has embarked on Crossrail, Europe’s largest construction project.
The plan is to build a new urban railway stretching over 100 km from West to East, one fifth of which will be in new twin-bore tunnels. With ten new stations, Crossrail will provide London with a fast and direct link to all the capital’s main employment centres, while at the same time easing chronic congestion on the Underground and suburban rail lines. At peak times, 24 trains per hour, each with a capacity of 1,500, will whisk passengers through the heart of the metropolis. When completed in 2018, Crossrail will carry 200 million passengers every year. This month, a vital bridge was gently manoeuvred into place providing a rail extension to London’s main air terminal at Heathrow. Currently, the Crossrail project employs 10,000 people working at any time on forty different construction sites. The directors of the Crossrail project “are determined to deliver Crossrail well within the current funding budget of £15.9 billion”. Cynical London commuters, including myself, recall how the first great rail project, called Thameslink, struggled to gain traction and quickly got bogged down in the usual wrangles and spiralling costs. The Thameslink project is only slowly taking shape many years behind schedule and somewhat over budget.
Londoners can sympathise with the plight of the good burghers of Stuttgart, who got so fed up with their equivalent of Thameslink that they eventually revolted and voted out the powers-that-be in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg. The “Stuttgart 21 project” promised a bright, new future in rail transport not only locally but also regionally, nationally and even internationally. They ended up with a big hole in the ground that turned out to be the graveyard for many aspiring political careers in one of the wealthiest cities in Germany.
Prospects are brighter for a major rail project in Sweden. The government in Stockholm has decided to press ahead with a new high-speed rail line that will head directly south from the capital to Sweden’s fourth largest city, Norrkoping. Not only will this line relieve pressure on the existing rail line to the port city of Gothenburg but it will also pass by a proposed second major air hub to be built on the site of the low-cost airline base at Skavsta, near Nykoping. The new high-speed link will dramatically reduce journey times and will form the northern end of a rail line that will eventually stretch all the way down to southern Sweden to link up with the very elegant Oresund road and rail bridge that already connects the Kingdom of Svea with its Viking neighbours in Denmark.
For their part, the Danes are forging ahead with their own rail tunnel project to link up with German Railways in the south to provide a super-fast passenger and container service right into the heart of Europe. Included in both the Scandinavia rail projects are container hubs that will enable fast and frequent intermodal train services to operate alongside the sleek and ultra-fast passenger services. This year, the Swedes opened a large, new freight terminal called Stockholm Nord, which is located close to the main airport at Arlanda and next to the main highway and rail line. A similar intermodal complex is being constructed to the south and this will make use of existing facilities based around the Skavsta Airport, the Katrineholm intermodal terminal and the container terminal in Norrkoping.
Meanwhile, over on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, the three EU states appear to have finally agreed on the route that the Rail Baltica will take. After much haggling, Vilnius will indeed be included in the proposed route. Why Vilnius was to be the only capital not included on the original route was never properly explained but, there again, there is much about the project that has never been properly explained. First, it is called Baltica, yet apart from a short stretch north of Riga, the route goes nowhere near the old Baltic trading route that hugged the shoreline and linked up numerous prosperous townships along the coast. Rather, the new route will head due south to the Polish capital Warsaw before heading West to the Prussian capital of Berlin. The railway will be built to standard gauge, although there is a perfectly good 1520 rail network in the region. They could have saved a great deal of money by turning Vilnius into an interchange point between the broad and standard gauges. This charming city is already a major container hub and where cargoes go, so people follow. Finally, the planners appear to have overlooked some rather important details: who is going to sit on a train all day long when they can take a one-hour flight with a low-cost airline to sample the dubious winter delights of the German or Polish capitals?
A better and far cheaper option would have been to link, via a short 1520 extension, the Baltic ports of Gdynia, Gdansk, Sopot, Elblag, Kaliningrad, Kaunas (with short links to Vilnius and Klaipeda), Riga and Tallinn. This would allow people to travel between these major ports and resorts. It would also have improved access to container and bulk cargo flows via the major ice-free ports. That would be a route worthy of the name “Rail Baltica”.
John Keir, Ross Learmont Ltd.
04 June 2014
Copyright ©, 2014, John Keir