CargoBeamer in Calais – A milestone on the road towards greater environmental protection in goods transportation within Europe

By 2020, the port's capacity will be expanded even further. The CargoBeamer Group from Leipzig is investing in a highly innovative and efficient road/rail transshipment facility in Calais: In the future, right at the entrance to the port and the Channel Tun-nel, 18 automated "CargoBeamer Gate Modules" will quietly and automatically load and unload up to 900 semi-trailers of all types, every single day, onto rail cars. The semi-trailers will arrive at Calais by rail from major industrial and logistics centres on the European mainland. This facility will permanently lighten the load on the road network and the environment throughout Europe. With CargoBeamer France SAS’s acquisition of an area of approximately 6 hectares in the "Z.A.C. de La Turquerie" business park, located adjacent to the motorway, and the agreed production of the road and rail links by the town of Calais, the contractual foundations for the Cargo-Beamer terminal have been put in place today.

In the words of Natacha Bouchart, President of Grand Calais Terres & Mers, Mayor of Calais and Vice-President of the Hauts de France Region, "The establishment of CargoBeamer is a major step both for the Calais area and the region towards the noiseless and environmentally-friendly transportation of goods by rail. With the in-terconnection of the rail network and the link to the road haulage system benefiting ZAC de la Turquerie, as well as the planned establishment of other major specialist logistics companies, the Calais region can fully and sustainably exploit the ad-vantages of its location as a crossroads between Great Britain and mainland Eu-rope."

“In addition to the predestined position, a key element in the choice of this location is the constructive and trustworthy support of Mayor Bouchart and Calais town", ex-plains the CEO of CargoBeamer AG, Dr. Hans-Jürgen Weidemann on the occasion of the signature of the contract in Calais. "For us, today's contract conclusion marks a very special milestone in the construction of a European network with efficient transshipment facilities and environmentally-friendly transportation routes for logis-tics companies in Europe. It will simultaneously lighten the load on the road system in Europe and ease the environmental burden."

The CargoBeamer Group is a logistics service provider in the combined road/rail transportation sector, with headquarters in Leipzig, Germany. Using proprietary
technology based on rail cars, transshipment terminals and logistics and dispatching software, all standard HGV semi-trailers - and these make up around three-quarters of goods traffic transported by road - can travel by rail without additional conversion work or reinforcement of the semi-trailers, with no need for drivers and towing vehi-cles, and with no restrictions on Sundays and public holidays - and with 4 tons more cargo loading capacity per trip.