Rail terminal at Kiel’s Schwedenkai will get an additional track
The rail terminal at Kiel’s Schwedenkai will get an additional track so that the group of entrance tracks will then be made up of three railway lines, the company said in its release. As a result, the port’s line-up capacity for wagons will be enhanced in order to reduce train movements to and from the shunting station Kiel-Meimersdorf.
The 300 m long railway track will be laid on the waterside in parallel to the two existing lines running along the Bahnhofskai. South of the bridge “Hörnbrücke” and the pedestrian crossing it will merge into the terminal entrance track. The total investment in the track, the switches and the compensatory measures amounts to 1.25 million Euros and is registered for subsidy by the state of Schleswig-Holstein and the European Union. The construction works will begin in the middle of November and are envisaged to be finished by spring 2020.
The pedestrian, bike and supply traffic along the Bahnhofskai will remain unaffected thereby.
In the course of the project two rows of trees need to be removed which will be replaced by newly planted trees of better quality. More than 500,000 Euros have been budgeted for this measure alone. One the one hand, 40 trees will be planted at the nearby Hörnbad swimming pool as well as 20 fruit trees and there will be created a meadow orchard in the adjacent Gaarden city district. On the other hand, 49 deciduous trees will be planted along the railway track by the end of March and replace the existing row of trees along the waterside. Urban vegetation and rail freight traffic contribute to better air quality.
By transferring truck transport units to rail transport about 60 grams of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) can be avoided per tonne-kilometre. As 32,000 trailers and containers are expected to be loaded onto trains at the Schwedenkai Terminal next year, there will be calculative savings of more than 35,000 tonnes of CO2 in the seaport’s hinterland traffic.