The Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda (Mitma) has received at the Barcelona Can-Tunis terminal the 25 Renfe Mercancías 40-foot containers loaded with 600 tons of Ukrainian corn after completing the pilot project. The adapted containers arrived on Thursday night and the unloading of the cereal has already begun in the trucks that have been sent to the terminal by the companies that have bought the cereal at origin through a wholesaler.
From now on, it will be taken by road to its final destination in the Iberian Peninsula. Despite the complicated situation at the Chelm terminal, located on the border between Poland and Ukraine, it was possible to complete the loading of the cereal into the containers and activate the return journey, which has been made through the railway highway, which It implies an approximate route of 2,400 kilometers. The way back to Barcelona has included a stop in Lodz and a small stopover in Duisburg (Germany), where the train has been forced to remain stopped for more days than expected due to the strike called in France, which has restricted railway traffic for your country.
The pilot project is serving to analyze the capacity and viability of rail freight transport as a complement to the maritime transport of raw materials, using rail motorways within the European Union (EU). Thus, if in Europe a situation of port closures and blockade of cereal exports by sea is experienced again, as happened after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, this experience allows us to have the knowledge to develop this type of large-scale freight transport and help ensure the supply of raw materials.
In this sense, the initiative has shown that, in the current context, long-distance rail transport requires a great effort of coordination between the different actors that participate in the process, the most complex points being management at the terminals, as with the loading of grain in containers adapted with "liners" at the Chelm terminal, and the responsibility for it on the return journey. Sea containers with large special bags have been used for the transport of corn to increase grain loading capacity since there are not enough special railway containers for grain on the market to compensate for possible limitations in maritime exports, such as those experienced before the summer .
