Kuehne + Nagel, EJOT and Kreisbahn send pilot transport from the South Westphalia container terminal on its way
36 pallets with 19,000 kilograms of finished goods from EJOT have now been transported from the South Westphalia container terminal to Austria by rail on two swap bodies. The branch of the forwarding company Kühne + Nagel in Haiger organized the transport: both the truck transport from Wittgenstein to the terminal, the rail shipment and the onward carriage in Austria to the recipient - the EJOT branch in Voitsberg. The Kreisbahn Siegen-Wittgenstein had commissioned DB Cargo with the rail transport from Kreuztal to Graz.
For Kuehne+Nagel, the transport was a test run to find an answer to the question of whether it makes sense to transport EJOT products by train from Kreuztal to Graz. EJOT sends around 1,200 pallets with around 340 tons of goods from Wittgenstein to its subsidiary in Austria every year. As of now, this is done by truck.
Philipp Scherer, Team Leader Pallet Management at Kuehne+Nagel, became aware of intermodal road/rail transport during a training course to become a “Freight Transport and Logistics Specialist”. Therefore, in April 2021, he started a project for handling rail transport. For the transport company from Haiger, the question is whether they should regularly offer its customers such combined transports in the future.
The project is also interesting for EJOT, as the Wittgenstein-based company wants to be climate-neutral by 2035. The current CO2 footprint is around 190,000 tons of CO2 per year. "That's why every idea to reduce emissions is welcome, like this test to transport pallet goods to Austria by rail," says Sebastian Böttcher, strategic buyer for transport and logistics at EJOT: "We're happy to work with our logistics partner Kühne+ Nagel to be able to test this relation in combined traffic. A partial shift of our transports to rail could make a significant contribution to reducing emissions. The bottom line is that it is important to find a good balance between emissions generated, running time and transport costs.”
Philipp Scherer can only underline this: "I am very pleased that this test run could take place after many discussions with Kreisbahn and DB Caro. I hope that we can offer and implement more such transports in the future.”
This test transport is also very attractive for Christian Betchen, Managing Director of Kreisbahn - for various reasons: "The fact that products from Wittgenstein are transported by a forwarder from the Lahn-Dill district via the container terminal in South Westphalia shows that more and more companies in the Dreiländereck keep the container terminal in mind when making your logistics decisions.”
For District Administrator Andreas Müller, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Kreisbahn Siegen-Wittgenstein, this transport is further proof of the strategic importance of the container terminal: "In order to achieve our sustainability goals and significantly reduce CO2 emissions, more traffic must be transferred from the road to the Rail. I think it's excellent that with EJOT another local model company is now testing this alternative with its partners. I hope that the test will be successful and that such intermodal transports will become more and more common in the future.”
For Kuehne+Nagel, the transport was a test run to find an answer to the question of whether it makes sense to transport EJOT products by train from Kreuztal to Graz. EJOT sends around 1,200 pallets with around 340 tons of goods from Wittgenstein to its subsidiary in Austria every year. As of now, this is done by truck.
Philipp Scherer, Team Leader Pallet Management at Kuehne+Nagel, became aware of intermodal road/rail transport during a training course to become a “Freight Transport and Logistics Specialist”. Therefore, in April 2021, he started a project for handling rail transport. For the transport company from Haiger, the question is whether they should regularly offer its customers such combined transports in the future.
The project is also interesting for EJOT, as the Wittgenstein-based company wants to be climate-neutral by 2035. The current CO2 footprint is around 190,000 tons of CO2 per year. "That's why every idea to reduce emissions is welcome, like this test to transport pallet goods to Austria by rail," says Sebastian Böttcher, strategic buyer for transport and logistics at EJOT: "We're happy to work with our logistics partner Kühne+ Nagel to be able to test this relation in combined traffic. A partial shift of our transports to rail could make a significant contribution to reducing emissions. The bottom line is that it is important to find a good balance between emissions generated, running time and transport costs.”
Philipp Scherer can only underline this: "I am very pleased that this test run could take place after many discussions with Kreisbahn and DB Caro. I hope that we can offer and implement more such transports in the future.”
This test transport is also very attractive for Christian Betchen, Managing Director of Kreisbahn - for various reasons: "The fact that products from Wittgenstein are transported by a forwarder from the Lahn-Dill district via the container terminal in South Westphalia shows that more and more companies in the Dreiländereck keep the container terminal in mind when making your logistics decisions.”
For District Administrator Andreas Müller, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Kreisbahn Siegen-Wittgenstein, this transport is further proof of the strategic importance of the container terminal: "In order to achieve our sustainability goals and significantly reduce CO2 emissions, more traffic must be transferred from the road to the Rail. I think it's excellent that with EJOT another local model company is now testing this alternative with its partners. I hope that the test will be successful and that such intermodal transports will become more and more common in the future.”
Contact EJOT Group
Andreas Wolf
Public relation
