Combined transport holds potential

With the goods volumes rising worldwide the demand for attractive logistics concepts combining several transport carriers is rising. With container terminals and port plants Chemion Logistik has the infrastructure which is necessary for multimodal transport at hand. And even more: Chemion sees it as a challenge to develop individual transport solutions for its customers, in which the factors cost-effectiveness, reliability and safety go hand in hand. With own rail transports and an own shunting platform Chemion shows that the transport carrier rail can be an attractive part of multimodal solutions, with a benefit for the environment.

Efficient hubs for all variants

 The four container depots of Chemion are specially designed for the storage and transshipment of hazardous goods and form the basis for all variants in the combined transport: Two warehouses at the locations Leverkusen and Dormagen, Germany, are directly connected to road and rail and together offer 720 places for 20`tank and box containers. There is space for 460 containers in the trimodal port plant in Leverkusen. Through daily inland navigation transports there exists a direct connection to the ARA ports (Antwerp, Rotterdam, Amsterdam) from the terminal. Through the good infrastructure within and between the locations Chemion can also offer the transshipment on the transport carrier ship. An empty container terminal serves to relieve the work for the hazardous goods warehouse, that can take 600 empty cleaned and uncleaned containers and offers sufficient possibilities for the interim storage. As the terminals are located in a strategically favorable position in the Rhine-Ruhr-Region, there are excellent connections to the federal highways and to the national railway network. Since the end of 2008 Chemion has moreover been operating a shunting platform on the CHEMPARK site in Leverkusen and on this basis can also connect further route transports in the region. In short: The centrally located, efficient transshipment centers of Chemion open up many possibilities for combination for the flexible organization of transport chains.

Good connection via the rail for round overall solution

With the combined transport it depends above all on one thing: on the good combination. This means that interfaces have to be managed optimally in order for the individual transport sections to follow on from each other without any time delay. However, this also means that the transport chain must be well-planned and the respective best transport routes have to merge into an efficient whole process. Wherever possible Chemion integrates the railway into the transport solution of its customers and this for several good reasons: Railway is an environmentally-friendly transport carrier and enables reliable and safe transports without traffic jams. Rail transports are interesting as feeder services as many companies in the chemical and chemical-related industry have a railway siding. Therefore, they can receive raw materials for the production by rail or dispatch goods produced with these on the transport route. These benefits of the railway can also be used profitably in the combined transport and realize both cost-effective as well as flexible solutions, Chemion has shown this with various rail concepts. The pre-requisite is that the time-consuming services at the location are also included in the calculation with rail transport and the rail transport itself is linked with other service areas. This results in transport solutions which are integrated into the processes of the production and distribution and which guarantee a high degree of planning safety.

Jointly provide flexible services

In order to also be able to design rail transports in an attractive manner beyond the Rhine-Ruhr-Region Chemion cooperates with other service providers and with these opens up the connection to important intercity railway traffic relations. Thus, for example Chemion has been cooperating with Havelländische Eisenbahn AG (hvle) since 2008 and regularly connects the Rhineland with the Berlin region via the East-West axle. A further example for networked actions is the execution of rail transports with household waste, which Chemion took over last year within the framework of a nationwide relief action to remove the state of emergency with waste in Southern Italy: The containers were delivered by rail from Naples to Cologne-Kalk North, Germany, where Chemion took them over and from there brought them into the container terminals. Here the containers were transshipped onto trucks and therefore prepared for their further transport to municipal incineration plants.