Barges to the rescue

Thanks to the recent cold weather, several municipalities are experiencing a shortage of salt and turning to barges to deliver supplies. In the short term, inland navigation is being used to urgently transport salt to Oss, Dordrecht and Delfzijl in the Netherlands as well as northern Belgium including Antwerp. For example, the vessel Vector loaded salt on Sunday for transport to Oss. As the salt is urgently needed in Oss to prevent problems with the Monday morning rush hour, the Vector received special permission to use the Lith lock out of normal working hours. Winter weather has hindered road traffic over the past few weeks, but inland navigation in the Netherlands has not been affected. From the beginning of January, the IJsselmeer has been used with ice breakers. Read... 

The first new-built vessel with a ‘clean’ engine will be launched in the Netherlands, in March. The vessel, the MS Anda, a dry cargo vessel, already complies with the strict emissions standards that will come into force at the end of 2010 and is in keeping with the Dutch government’s ambition for new inland shipping vessels to deliver ‘the best environmental performance’ from 2016. The naming ceremony will be attended by the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Ruud Lubbers, as council chairman of the Rotterdam Climate Initiative. Read...

Second beer boat is electrical

A long promised plan to create an electrical “beerboat” for Utrecht became a reality in January this year, when a second vessel to service restaurants in Utrecht’s inner city areas was launched. The new “beerboat” in completely electrical, with both the engine and the crane being electrically powered by clean energy. Once charged, the ship can sail for eight or nine hours. The vessel has a length of 18.8 metres, is 4.26 metres wide and its maximum gauge is only 1.1 metres. The innovative boat is part of Utrecht’s plan to reduce air pollution and is partially financed by the European Union. Read...

Freezer Barge service for the Netherlands 

In February, a new service of barges specially designed to transport refrigerated and freezer containers began between Rotterdam and the Maasvlakte area. It is expected that the service will transport between 150 and 200 freezer containers that would otherwise go via road.  The service is mainly focused on transporting fruit and vegetables. A spokesperson for the service said that barges are a competitive alternative because the storage costs of reefers in the Waalhaven are much lower than on the Maasvlakte. Read...

In December 2009 the town and country planning department of the Walloon region issued a license to allow the building of a fourth lock at Lanaye. This fourth lock, which will be constructed to the east of the three existing locks, will have a working length of 225m and a width of 25m. The lock will allow the passage of vessels up to 9,000 tonnes. To maintain the water level of the Albert Canal, water will be pumped from the Meuse back to the canal to compensate for the water consumption of the lock complex. In addition, a hydroelectric power station with a 2 megawatts capacity will function whenever the flow of the Meuse allows it. The license to proceed includes the condition that 90 percent of the construction and building site materials for the new lock should be delivered and removed by water, that the three existing locks should be renovated and that a catering space should be developed on the site. Construction is planned to start in autumn of 2010, with the lock becoming operational in 2014. Read...

“Amfibus” solution for the Clyde

A Dutch developed “amfibus” has begun tryouts on the river Clyde in Glasgow. Based on a bus chassis, the amfibus incorporates a hull to allow the vehicle to float. On the roads, it operates like a standard coach, but in the water it is driven by twin water jets and can reach up to 8 knots. Passengers would be able to travel on road and water without having to leave their seats to change transport modes. The EUR 800,000 “amfibus” has been borrowed by UK company Stagecoach from a Dutch company that plans to operate five of them around Rotterdam and will begin tests in February as a possible replacement for the Clyde ferry in Glasgow. Read...

Figures released by the British Department for Transport (DfT) show that over two million tonnes of freight were handled on the Thames in 2008, making the Thames the UK’s busiest inland waterway. In addition, the Port of London Authority (PLA) predicts that with several massive new construction projects beginning in the New Year this figure could triple over the next five years. According to the PLA the 2.18 million tonnes of materials moved on the river in 2008 helped keep more than 175,000 lorry movements off the south east of England’s congested roads. With new projects including the Crossrail project, the Olympics and the Thames Tideway Tunnels set to make extensive use of the river for their construction needs, up to six million tonnes of materials will be transported on the river every year, saving almost half a million lorry movements a year. Read...

Barge service between Venice and Cremona grows 

In February, Fluviomar, an Italian inland navigation company, added three more barges to its Venice Cremona route, bringing the total to five. Through adding the extra barges, they hope to save 65 thousand truck movements a year, with a commensurate reduction of thirty thousand tonnes of C02. The Venetian port estimates that, including external costs such as exhaust emissions and the possibility of accidents with commensurate health care costs, transport costs by inland waterways could be up to seven times lower than road transport. They also estimate that within a year the pollution of areas surrounding the road network could fall by 10 percent. Read...

German government to improve fairway conditions on Elbe

The German Ministry of Transport, has announced that, in order to encourage use of the river Elbe for inland waterway transport, maintenance works will be carried out to aim at ensuring a minimum fairway depth of 1.60m on 345 days of the year. The announcement stressed that all works would be carried out under environmentally friendly conditions. Clearance works to remedy the damage caused by the 2002 flooding along the Elbe will be concluded this year and all transport forecasts indicate a substantial increase of cargo volumes as soon as triple-stacked container transport is feasible. BDB (Bundesverband der Deutschen Binnenschiffahrt) along with other sector representatives welcomed the initiative of the federal government. Read...

Glass transport pilot study in Paris 

Paris is conducting a pilot study to investigate the possibility of transporting recyclable glass using inland waterway transport. Every year, 2,500 truck movements are necessary to transport glass collected from public glass deposit bins to the processing center in Rozet Saint-Albin, in Aisne. A first test using river transport as an alternative was carried out between Gennevilliers and the processing center, via the port of Soissons along the Seine and the Oise. Six more tests will be carried out, exploring various waterways. Already today Paris transports more than 2.5 million tonnes of waste by river, among which cinders, papers, plastics, bulk, industrial and building material waste. Read...

UTILE research project moves to second phase

The UTILE research project has completed its estimation of the potential of interconnecting the river-rail-road logistics offerings of the 45ft pallet-wide container. UTILE, French for useful, stands here for “ILU for European Logistics” and is a project researching the 45ft PW market in France. The 45ft PW is an intermodal transport unit dedicated to the intra-EU market. It provides a better load fill of pallets than 40ft containers and it competes with road semi-trailers with or without 13.60m swap bodies which are not stackable. The 45ft PW can be stacked, just like the ISO sea container. This is its main advantage. Read...

Inland waterway transport revolution?

Even 'The Economist' has noticed the potential of inland waterway transport, running a page length story in the 18th of February edition about passenger transport on the river Thames. The story features entrepreneur Sean Collins, whose business offering commuter transport on the Thames, which started as Collins River Enterprises in 1999, shows every sign of surviving its second decade, despite the economy’s woes and volatile fuel costs. The story doesn’t mention other initiatives aimed at making rivers an integral part of the urban commuter landscape, such as Voguéo, Paris’ shuttle boat service, which effectively makes the Seine Paris’ latest metro line, or Rotterdam’s water taxis. Read...

Inland navigation communicators’ seminar a great success

On 29 January, the PLATINA project (Platform for the implementation of NAIADES) convened an interactive one day networking seminar in Brussels for all inland navigation communicators who communicate about or on behalf of inland waterway transport. The Communicator 2 Communicator workshop offered communicators an opportunity to meet colleagues from other organisations and countries and share working experiences and challenges. During the seminar, the findings of a reputation and image survey of inland waterway transport, carried out by the market research agency Think BBDO on behalf of the PLATINA team, were presented. The participants, who hailed from a diverse range of countries, including Austria, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Croatia, Romania and Germany, were all positive about the unusual initiative. Since the meeting, a Linked In group has been formed to enable communicators to carry on talking to each other.  Read... and Linked In group