DHL has announced that it is opened three additional rail competence centres in Europe in response to a growing demand for rail freight services between Europe and Asia. The sites are located in Le Havre, France, Felixstowe, UK and Genoa, Italy, and are staffed with China Rail experts who advise customers and coordinate freight volumes.
The new rail service, operating between Xi’an in China and Hamburg and Neuss in Germany, has been set up in cooperation with Xi’an International Inland Port Investment & Development Group Co. Ltd. and is cutting transit time from 17 days to between 10 and 12 days.
The rail competence centres already coordinate significant volumes of export and import flows, including less-than-container-load (LCL) DHL RailConnect and full-container-load (FCL) DHL RailLine products. They coordinate end-to-end transport processes from collection and export all the way to customs clearance and delivery by truck or combined rail transport to the final destination. Customers benefit from shipment tracking, including temperature information upon request. Following the four regional rail competence centres in China and a European DHL rail competence centre in Poland, the first dedicated Country DHL rail competence centre was opened in Stuttgart, Germany in 2017.
Starting in Xi’an, at the heart of the New Silk Road economic belt, the new rail service takes an approximate 9,400 km route through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, and Lithuania to Kaliningrad Oblast, a part of the Russian Federation on the south coast of the Baltic Sea, before entering the European Union via the Mamonovo-Braniewo crossing. The final stretch of the route crosses Poland into Germany to the port city of Hamburg, and to Neuss, an important logistics hub on the Rhine River opposite Düsseldorf. This also shortens transit times for customers to other European countries including Benelux, France and the UK.
The fast Xi’an-Germany rail connection will offer customers real-time milestone visibility, using GPS tracking of shipments via the iSee software platform to give shippers door-to-door visibility and insight into any shipping exceptions as soon as they occur.
Source: DHL
