Kuehne + Nagel rises to challenge of congested British roads
Kuehne+Nagel is opening an intermodal terminal in central England to meet the increasing challenge of moving deepsea containers through British ports on ever more congested roads.
The Swiss global logistics provider has signed a deal to use part of ABP Connect’s rail-connected Hams Hall facility on the outskirts of Birmingham. It expects to start operations there within two months.
K+N’s chief executive for North West Europe, Peter Ulber, said that initially the intention was to run up to three container trains a day, two from Southampton and one from Felixstowe.
The development of those operations will help K+N to double the proportion of ocean freight containers it moves around the country by rail rather than by road.
‘Three years ago we had zero movement of containers by rail,’ he said. ‘Now the figure is about 25% and we expect within two years to increase that to 50%.’
The planned opening of the Hams Hall operation, was ‘in line with the strategy of being able to control (container) flows ourselves all the way to the distribution centres of our customers’.
In addition to the container train connections from and to leading ports, contracted out to existing operators such as EWS and Freightliner, the Hams Hall terminal would also handle ‘at least a certain percentage’ of the company’s road-based container movements in the country.
Last year K+N’s British contract logistics division had seen GBP80m (USD158m) of existing contracts renewed and also secured GBP140m of new contracts.
Based on turnover, K+N is now number three in the British contract logistics market behind DHL and Wincanton. Plans for further developing that business included expanding total capacity by about 10%.
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