More cargo on the Danube
Inland shipping on the river Danube could be kissed awake from its beauty sleep by a liner service. The project is being analysed and developed in Vienna.
Austria’s intermodal split shows that inland shipping services in the country account for a modest 2.5% of all goods transported. There are many points that speak out against transporting goods on the country’s waterways. One such point, according to Matthias Prandtstetter, a senior scientist with the Vienna-based Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), is “the critical mass that is necessary to operate regular services.”
Prandtstetter and Benjamin Biesinger are the coordinators of a project entitled CEE Riverbridge, which is being developed under the auspices of the AIT. It is currently in the transition phase to becoming a pilot project. The central question the undertaking addresses is this: What has to be done to bring adequate volumes of goods to the inland waterways in order for scheduled services to become viable in Austria and in Europe?
Liner services and steel pallets
The basic aim of the project is to initiate scheduled services on the river Danube, which will then surely bring more containers, lorries and trailers onto the waterways. Prandtstetter explains that “in order to realise this a patent has been developed that will enable inland shipping operators to place the units on so-called flats (a sort of steel pallet) and than slot them into a special shelf installed on a barge or lighter.”
Loading in ports can be effected by means of classic gantry cranes, equipped with a spreader to tranship containers. The advantages include the fact that an intermodal shift towards the inland waterways would be profitable, as a complete (container)ship would not have to be filled with goods anymore. Rather, each slot can be booked individually, as per demand. Prandtstetter is convinced that the critical mass for cost-effective transport operations can be realised by bundling various modes of transport.
The commonly-held belief that barges can frequently not sail on the river Danube on account of high or low water levels can easily be countered by the bare facts – the Danube in Austria was fit for traffic on 351 days in 2017. It would not be a problem to overcome short periods of difficult water levels with rail or road transport options. Another advantage lies in the fact that units transported on the Danube do not need to be accompanied. Lorries would only operate in an area with a radius of around 80 – 120 km around the port, allowing lorry drivers to adhere to their eight-hour rhythms, says Prandtstetter. The AIT’s project has analysed the possibility of such scheduled services. From the Austrian point of view the Danube region from southern Germany via Vienna and Bratislava to Budapest is primarily relevant. Thus Prandtstetter and Biesinger analysed data and the limited transport budgets for this area.
Regular services a viable option
Their conclusions are that the potential transport volumes (and the resultant demand) available in this corridor would make profitable operations possible – “under the special consideration that a complete round trip is possible in the given timeframe,” as Prandtstetter underlines. The project also evolved a construction plan for the necessary conversion of a lighter. It ensures that the barge would remain stable and that the load could be distributed over the entire hold.
Taking the data for a lighter into account, the team selected a pushboat and evaluated the energy it expects it to use and calculated its operating costs. The infrastructure available in the sections of the river chosen was also analysed. It is more than adequate.
The bottom line? The economic operation of scheduled services is entirely viable.