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Antwerp mushrooming container port

4th October 1968, Page 42
4th October 1968
Page 42
Page 43
Page 42, 4th October 1968 — Antwerp mushrooming container port
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

AS A container port Antwerp has been hiding its light under a bushel. This situation was remedied last week when the city and port authorities invited a large party of international journalists (among them a CM staff man) to spend a day examining the port's growing facilities and the major road works which will link Antwerp with much of Europe by motorway. Two routes, the E10 linking Paris, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and the E3 (the Stockholm-Lisbon motorway) are principally involved.

Antwerp is fortunate in being chosen as one of the main points on E3, for although this 2,200-mile leg of the great European network will not be complete from Sweden to Portugal for many years, Belgium is well ahead with her own sections, which will probably be finishing in 1971. This will provide a motorway from Antwerp southwards to Ghent near the French border and northwards beyond Turnhout to the Dutch border.

Eventually E3 will run northwards from Portugal through Bordeaux, Paris, Antwerp, Eindhoven, Venlo, Dortmund, Hamburg, Flensburg, Frederikshaven, and thence by ferry to Gothenburg and Stockholm.

There is also a motor-road from Antwerp to the East (Liege and Aachen), linking the port with Belgium's own industrial comp:ex and the Ruhr. To bring these motorway junctions or termini, and others to The Hague and Brussels, into the best relationship a ring road is being built to link them and to bypass Antwerp itself.

A section of E3 will be a tunnel under the River Scheldt, with three traffic lanes in each direction. Part of this will be open next summer, and is urgently needed to relieve the bottleneck of the present narrow tunnel.

So the planned road network will provide Antwerp with the hinterland links that a growing port needs (and could be a lesson to Britain in backing up dock development with proper facilities for road freight).

As to the port itself, the growth and the potential seem enormous. Surprisingly, Antwerp is already by far the biggest general-cargo port on the Western European mainland. Now that its big new Churchill Dock is completed it is plunging into container traffic in a big way—and has no fewer than five purpose-built container berths completed or under construction.

This must certainly have an effect on the Transport Ferry Service's traffic, which is already running at a very high level. Having consolidated its services at Felixstowe, TFS now runs from there to Antwerp and Rotterdam, and is one of only two UK ferries using Antwerp, so its position as a feeder line for deep-sea container traffic as well as for direct UK-Europe freight looks extremely promising.

In 1966 Antwerp handled 43,820 loaded containers. in 1967 57,020 and in 1968 expects the number to exceed 70,000. In

fact a recent problem is a shortage of containers to take the loads offered for this type of shipment.

Not that this has caught Antwerp's container-handling facilities napping: Belgian shrewdness had dictated that the gantry cranes must be able to handle general cargo as well as unit loads or containers.

It is interesting to learn that although the terminals are operated by private enterprise (except for the State railways), the port authority and the operators have agreed a common track width of 15 metres for most of the mobile gantries around the 5i-km quay wall of the Churchill Dock. And at least two companies, sharing adjacent berths, have agreed to share their cranage to cope with peak traffic in either's berth.

Farthest advanced of the Antwerp container berths is the Hessenatie-Neptunus Ltd. facility which has been operating since February and has two Boomse 35-ton-capacity transporter cranes for containers up to 40ft. The marshalling area has an overhead travelling crane, plus straddle-carriers, a sideloader and fork-lift trucks.

This Hessenatie terminal is presently handling containers for Atlantic Container Line, Sea Containers Inc., Moore-McCormack Lines and ICS. Since ACL uses roll-on/off ships there is a linkspan rated for loads up to 120 tons.

Next door on the Churchill quayside is Westerlund Corporation Ltd., which will have a 30/38-ton capacity gantry crane in operation by the end of October: among the planned facilities is a 20.000 sq. yd. trailer park.

Also coming into service now is the Noord Natie Ltd. container and heavy-cargo terminal which will have a 45-ton gantry crane and two 10/20-ton dockside cranes.

Another terminal on the southern side of the Churchill Dock is the Gylsen Stevedoring Co. combined container/roll-on establishment. This has two 45-ton transporter cranes (Boom/ACE) and six 10-ton dockside cranes.

This Gylsen terminal is already handling large cargoes of United States Lines containers and will soon be handling Belgian Line containers for a new service to the USA.

On the northern side of the dock is the Pays terminal which combines container and roll-on facilities. Run by Antvverps Havenbedrilf Pays Ltd., it has one 53-ton transporter crane built by Kooks of Bremen and four dockside cranes rated at 8 to 20 tons but capable of working in unison to lift 35 tons. A MAFI straddle carrier is used for marshalling.

These five container berths all have large marshalling areas, most have new warehouses—and the equipment and buildings are all brand new.

Also on or near the Churchill Dock are the container/trailer marshalling terminals of Corns Swarttouw Antwerp (which also has a new general-cargo quay) and TERRE (Belgian State Railways). The latter has been operating since last year and is designed to provide the Belgian rail terminus for Intercontainer, the container consortium formed last year by 12 European railway networks. At present TERRE is handling Sea Land, US Lines and CTI containers in substantial numbers.

Near TERRE is the container marshalling area of CMB (Compagnie Maritime Beige), whose Belgian Line container work is shortly to be handed over to sister-company Gylsen.

Behind all this lies the fact that the Churchill Dock already has excellent road links with the city and the European hinterland—and that the port of Antwerp operates for 24 hours a day 365 days a year 1366 this year).

TFS is busy

As mentioned earlier. Transport Ferry Service, which recently relinquished its Tilbury berth to concentrate on Felixstowe, is extremely busy these days, not least with container traffic. A recent trip between the three points of its North Sea services triangle—Felixstowe, Antwerp. Rotterdam )Europoort)—showed just how heavy the demand is.

TFS is now running five services a week in each direction between Felixstowe and Antwerp, and rather more than half the traffic is containers and flats. But "wheels" still have a slight edge 160/40 per cent) on the Europoort run, where there are six services a week in each direction.

At Antwerp the TFS berth is only a stone's throw from the new deep-sea container terminals, and stands to benefit from the growth of this traffic. Farther up the coast Europoort is still growing fast, and both TFS and North Sea Ferries are only a few miles downstream from the Prinses Magnet deepsea container terminal which at the time of our visit was handling United States Lines and Moore-McCormack Lines containers.

Despite their busy preoccupation with booming freight the TFS ferries we travelled in (the Gaelic and the Em-op/c) have retained their exceptional comfort and service, as good as that on many a passenger line. Returning from Rotterdam in a Force 8 south-westerly gale. the Europic showed its remarkable

stability: meals were being taken normally and the crockery was not even clattering.

More for Manchester

Among new orders for Metro-Cammell containers worth over El is one from Manchester Liners for a further 800 units (additional to the 2,000 alloy-panelled containers already on order for this operator). The new order is for 600 half-height bulk containers, developed for carrying high-density cargo such as metal bar and strip, and 200 open-top Salwall containers which have a built-in wall structure to take brackets and dunnage bars for load control.

The half-height models have an open top and 4ft steel and wood side panels which are removable to give all-round loading. The design has been adapted from the Metsak collapsible containers recently introduced by Metro-Cammell.

Baden gets ACT order

The first major road haulage equipment order placed by Associated Container Transportation for its UK-Australasia service starting in February has gone to Boden Trailers. The order, worth £110,000, is for 126 skeletal Boden tandem-axle container carriers designed to take 20ft units and run at 28 tons g.c.w.

With this latest ACT order, Crane Fruehauf/ Boden group is further consolidating a very strong position in supplying trailers for container operations. Earlier this year it secured an order for 350 skeletals_for Overseas Containers Ltd. (OCL), another for 141 for Sealand Service Inc., and a third for Belgian Line. Also, of the 616 Boden trailers ordered by THC Freight Association in May. 88 were platform/skeletals.

Among large orders for containers themselves, Crane Fruehauf is supplying no fewer than 5,000 20-footers to the OCL consortium.


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