Fully loaded container train on the way from South Korea to Europe
Multimodal shipments between Asia and Europe are gaining popularity among shippers. This has resulted in the formation of a fully loaded freight train from South Korea to the EU. It includes 62 forty-foot containers and provides a faster alternative to maritime delivery via the Suez Canal.
In late July, FESCO, the Russian logistics group that is focused on the Asia-Pacific Region, started the multimodal delivery of the record batch of the containers from South Korea to Europe. 62 forty-foot boxes with various equipment inside such as lighting and solar panels were shipped from the Port of Busan to Vladivostok via the FESCO Korea Express (FKXP) shipping line between the two points. At the largest port of Russia’s Far East, the containers were transhipped on the flat wagons to move further by rail to the Port of Saint Petersburg.
As of today, the boxes are on the way to the Russian major harbour on the Baltic Sea. To perform the delivery on the final leg, FESCO will use its shipping lines from Saint Petersburg to the ports of Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. The estimated transit time of this multimodal shipment is around 30 days that is 10-14 days faster than the conventional maritime route via the Suez Canal.
Back to 2019
The mentioned record shipment was organised within FESCO’s rapid transit cargo delivery service branded as FESCO Trans Baltic Bridge (FTBB). It was launched earlier this year and consists of two maritime legs as well as the rail freight link via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Two years ago, in 2019, FESCO in a partnership with RZD Logistics and PCC Intermodal started another multimodal service between South Korea and Europe, which is also based on the Trans-Siberian rail connections.
In a contrast to FTBB, it has only one maritime leg and is more focused on rails with sporadic use of trucks for the last mile. In summer 2019, the first multimodal shipment within this service was arranged from the Port of Busan to the Brzeg Dolny railway station, close to Wrocław in Poland, via Vladivostok and Małaszewicze. The entire transit time for the test delivery took 21 days.