Direct Rail Services, which has a main base in Carlisle, has started a ground-breaking rail service linking a North East port with the North West.
The service from Teesport to Manchester is the first on the route to use ultra-low level wagons which can carry standard high-cube containers.
The trial connection opens up the route to new customers and products to be moved by rail.
“This trial offers a new route to customers who may not have considered rail before,” Gottfried Eymer, NTS’s managing director for rail, said. “It is an open access service which will amalgamate different customers to one train, saving time and cost.
“Rail is much more environmentally friendly when compared to road, producing up to 76% fewer CO2 emissions and each train can remove up to 40 HGVs from the roads, reducing congestion.
“This is a fantastic opportunity for customers new to rail and we’d welcome anyone considering a switch to rail to get in touch.”
The service will operate from the PD Ports-owned terminal in Teesport and demonstrates the collaborative work which is going into diversifying supply chains and improving their environmental credentials.
“Trans Pennine connections for operators looking to move goods across the country have been confined to road freight for many years due to the constraints of the rail network, with height restrictions at stations, bridges and tunnels causing a number of issues,” Jo Edmenson, PD Ports’ key account manager for rail freight services, said.
“There is much anticipation about the Trans Pennine upgrade, which will hopefully remove many of those blockages, but with a completion date of 2030, we felt that was too long to wait when we considered the importance of rail freight as a means of decarbonising the supply chain and removing road movements from congested major routes.
“We’re excited to partner with DRS to offer this new service, direct from the UK’s sixth largest port to the heart of the North West. The route opens up a major new connection between the two regions and offers alternative means of shipping goods into the east coast of the UK and onwards, with the same true for exports.”
DRS is part of Nuclear Transport Solutions, which operates a wide variety of specialist transport solutions from nuclear to domestic intermodal rail services.
Earlier this week the company announced a new flow of aggregates from Shap to Sellafield.
