26 princes kiss a Danish sleeping beauty
Operations in the Hirtshals transhipment terminal. A road-rail transhipment facility that opened in Hirtshals (Denmark) in 2015 initially remained unused from its opening and seemed to have been a rather bad investment. Now the good news is that the project has been rejuvenated.
The terminal in Hirtshals boasts 675 m of railway sidings and 24,000 m2 of storage space. At the beginning of the project the Danish state spent DKK 30 million (EUR 4 million) on the main financing tranche for the centre.
Hirtshals is located at the northwestern tip of Jutland and is served, through the Skagerrak, by ferries from Kristiansand (Norway). A railfreight ferry formerly operated on this route was discontinued in 1996.
The concept for the terminal envisages transferring cargo brought in to Hirtshals by lorry from Norway to the railways for onward journeys to Germany as well as other to markets.
However, the Nordjyske Jernbaner, which operates regional trains between Hirtshals and Hjørring and which owns the relevant railway line, didn’t make the desired tracks available to DB Schenker, due to alleged operational problems.
Negotiations to solve the impasse proved inconclusive and the state-funded terminal in Hirtshals subsequently remained without an operator and almost completely without any traffic for more than eight years.
Freight trains arriving at the Hirtshals terminal proved to be the exception up until now. In September 2016, for example, when the port railway in Ålborg was out of service due to construction work, some of Captrain’s blocktrains connected Hirtshals, deploying venerable Nohab 1134 locomotives.
Last year, then, no less than 26 organisations from Denmark and Norway came together under the name ‘Grønn Jyllandskorridor’. They hail from politics and the freight forwarding sector and want to make the transport route via Jutland a preferred trade route to the European mainland from southern Norway, with its greater Stavanger and Bergen catchment areas. The focal point for this are long-planned southbound freight trains from Hirtshals.
A lost cause recovers
Thus the seemingly impossible may now still be possible after all. Early in February DB Cargo Scandinavia announced that the first freight train, loaded with containers and truck trailers, will leave the intermodal terminal on 2 May. For the time being it’s still being considered a test run that has to be evaluated.
Nordjyske Jernbaner and Hirtshals Havn are also official participating partners this time round. It seems that the obstacles to running an initial three weekly freight trains from the previously deserted terminal are now finally being removed.