Exercise 10 a) Read the text about multimodal transportation

Rail transports over 100 million tonnes of goods worth around £30 billion every year, while demand is predicted to grow by 30 per cent through to 2020. Rail can be cheaper than other forms of transport, particularly over long distances, and can offer greater reliability and time savings.

Multimodal transport is a transportation system usually operated by one carrier with more than one mode of transport. It involves a combination of truck, railcar, aeroplane or ship in succession to each other. As to the advantages of multimodal transport one should mention that it minimizes loss of time and the risk of loss, pilferage and damage to cargo at trans-shipment points; provides faster transit of goods; reduces burden of documentation and formalities; saves cost due to through freight rates and a lower cost of cargo insurance; establishes only one agency to deal with; reduces cost of exports and improve their competitive position in the international market.

Currently, different types of multimodal transport operations involving rail transport in different combinations are taking place, such as:

- Land-Sea-Land (an empty container is picked up from a container yard in Singapore and trucked to a manufacturer in Malaysia for stuffing, thereafter the FCL is trucked to Singapore and transported by ocean vessel to New York, rail from New York to a consignee’s warehouse in Chicago)

- Rail-Road-Inland Waterways-Sea (in common use when goods have to be moved by sea from one country to another and one or more inland modes of transport such as rail, road or inland waterways, have to be used for moving the goods from an inland centre to the seaport in the country of origin or from the seaport to an inland centre in the country of destination);

- Mini-bridge (movement of containers from a port in one country to a port in another country and then by rail to a second port city in the second country, terminating at the rail carrier’s terminal in the second port city, in operation on certain routes in the United States, the Far East, Europe, and Australia);

- Land bridge (shipment of containers overland as a part of a sea-land or a sea-land-sea route, in operation on certain important international routes such as between Europe or the Middle East and the Far East via the Trans-Siberian land bridge; and between Europe and the Far East via the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the USA);

- Piggyback (a combination of road and rail, becoming more popular due to combination of the speed and reliability of rail on long hauls with the door-to-door flexibility of road transport);

- Sea train (use of rail and ocean transport in which rail cars are shipped by sea and then simply driven off the vessel so that geographically separated rail systems can be connected by the use of an ocean carrier, these vessels are long and thin and consist of one main deck running the length of the ship);

New infrastructural developments propose the world to create a seamless flow of traffic e.g. the channel tunnel linking England and France, the Oresund Bridge linking Sweden and Denmark. As these projects have become reality so the flow of traffic changes. Other changes such as global warming pose the potential for new routes to open up via the northern sea between Russia’s northern border and the North Pole.

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