MARSEILLES is 900 kilometres from London and only a couple
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of British delegates were among those who took the opportunity to visit the Marseilles-Fos facilities.
Nevertheless, for a small number of British hauliers it is the gateway to North Africa destinations. How many that is, I was told is not recorded, but I noticed McCann International, of Uttoxeter, Dukes Transport, and Hertfordshire-based Funstons parked up near the Marseilles entrance.
This famous port is the oldest in France (dating to 600 BC). Container traffic has been handled since 1968-69 and there are now 90 regular services from the port.
The Gulf of Fos occupies a vast area including the mouth of the Rhone waterway which international barge traf fic can travel to 130km north of Lyons. In a few years' time, when the Rh6ne-Rhine canal is completed, there will be direct access to the north of Europe.
If Marseilles is a large port — the port director, in the leading coach, misdirected us to a blind alleyway of containers — Fos, around 40km away, is so big that the whole of Marseilles harbour could be accommodated in one of its docks. They take visitors to a tower viewing gallery, show them a map and provide high-power binoculars with which to look at the facilities vanishing into the Camargue (there was even a flock of around 50 pink flamingoes up the road — since the port authorities, who are developing the area with 90 per cent privately raised capital, claim they have even in some parts improved the environ ment!)
Fos was inaugurated 12 years ago, and features four dock basins extending from 41/2km inland, plus an oil tanker terminal with jetties extending 1.5km into the Gulf. Behind the complex is a large and developing industrial zone.
It is the Mediterranean's foremost container port; with the accent on deep-sea routes, it serves 127 ports throughout the world via 60 container shipping lines. It hardly needs saying that motorway routes provide good connections to Paris; and to Germany via Lyon and Beaune, Switzerland via Lyon — and closer-by to Italy and Spain. Express freight trains are run overnight. (Marseilles-Marignane is the second largest airport in France and handled 28,000 tons of airfreight in 1981).