Officially launched on October 17, the connection sees trains depart from Melzo east of Milan three times a week, to be ready for unloading along 750m intermodal rail tracks inside TMA Logistics' Holland Cargo Terminal (HCT), Amsterdam 24 hours later, the company said in its press release. As well as avoiding the driver delays increasingly affecting European road transport, arrivals in Amsterdam coincide with Samskip shortsea departures to Hull, creating a seamless multimodal option to minimise post-Brexit border control issues.
The new rail link is in addition to six times weekly train services connecting Melzo and Rotterdam, which will maintain their frequency in order to coordinate with shortsea services connecting to UK ports (Tilbury, Hull and Grangemouth), Ireland, Norway, Scandinavia and the Baltic States.
Adding rail capacity along a key unitised freight route demonstrates Samskip's commitment to enhancing the competitiveness of its UK-Italy multimodal offer as the reality of Brexit approaches, said Samskip UK Trade Manager, David Besseling. Samskip has performance guarantees in place with its terminal operations partners covering fast turn times for vessels, trucks and rail services.
With nine trains weekly between Italy and the Netherlands, Samskip's commitment to the multimodal transport of 45ft containers, reefers, flat racks and tank containers is now unrivalled. The addition of Amsterdam also brought in a hinterland and on-shipment opportunities that were very distinct from Rotterdam.
Southbound trains will depart from Amsterdam on Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays, with the same locomotive providing traction all the way to Melzo, in an extension of the agreement between Samskip and Swiss rail company BLS covering Rotterdam. At Melzo, services connect to Padova and Bari.
The new Amsterdam link would also provide greater service resilience for the Netherlands-Italy rail option. Connections to Amsterdam and Rotterdam will run along different routes, allowing flexibility in responding to any rail- or port-related delays.