When the Channel Tunnel between Calais in northern France and Folkstone on the southeastern coast of England opened in 1995, many forecasted a bright future for rail freight transport between Great Britain and continental Europe. An enormous amount of effort and money went into the construction of the two-track rail tunnel. The high hopes for the groundbreaking project have not yet been met, however. In fact, only 1.1 million metric tons of freight was transported by rail via the tunnel under the English Channel in 2010, less than before the 50-km tunnel opened.
High prices in particular have prevented rail freight transport from making greater use of the tunnel. Competition between freight forwarders that use the truck shuttle has kept prices in check. Eurotunnel charges a higher, constant price for block trains, however, and as a result, only a few providers can afford the transfer.
DB Schenker Rail, one of the largest freight customers, operates around 25 trains through the Channel Tunnel each week. It transports up to 1,800 metric tons of steel coils weekly through the tunnel for Tata Steel Europe alone, a division of the Indian Tata Group. DB Schenker Rail set up a shuttle service for the steel producer between its sites in Wales and the Netherlands. It is aiming to increase capacity utilization of the Channel Tunnel through offers that make use of the advantages of the European network.
Picking line 22 at the Tata plant in the Dutch city of Ijmuiden had to be fully renovated after suffering damage in December 2010. Raw steel cleaning, rolling and pickling operations have had to be relocated to the Llanwern and Tostre production facilities in Wales during the renovations. The shuttle service closes the production gap while taking advantage of synergies between the different European sites. Hot rolled coils are loaded at a hot strip mill in Ijmuiden and transported to Tostre in southwest Wales via Antwerp, Calais and the Channel Tunnel. There they are unloaded and transformed into sheet products at a Tata Steel cold forming facility. The twenty empty cars then head to Llanwern, where they are loaded with pickled coils, which are urgently needed in Ijmuiden. The trains also transport steel products, which are sent from Ijmuiden onward to Italy and Sweden. In just six months DB Schenker Rail has transported over 220,000 metric tons through the Channel Tunnel and all across Europe.
There is also a technical challenge to overcome in addition to the logistical challenges. The British structure gauge, which is 30 centimeters smaller than the structure gauge in continental Europe, brings trains to a halt just past the British border. The structure gauge is the minimum clearance that must be maintained between the track and fixed installations. Vehicle designs also take this gauge into account. Central European cars are simply too wide for the British rail network. Their journey stops just after passing through the Channel Tunnel, and freight has to be transferred to British cars or trucks for further transport inland.
This will soon be unnecessary, however. As of January 2011, High Speed 1 (HS1), a high-speed route that connects London to the Channel Tunnel, can now also accommodate trains with the Central European structure gauge. DB Schenker Rail (UK) Ltd. began testing European cars on this route in June. Five loaded freight trains made successful journeys along HS1. “The tests were another important step toward enabling freight trains from any location in Europe to travel to London on DB Schenker Rail’s pan-European network,” says Alain Thauvette, CEO of DB Schenker Rail (UK) Ltd. Using the wider cars will make importing and exporting freight via the English channel more efficient
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