Railroad - After storms: Emmelsum port waits for rail connection
The port of Emmelsum on the Lower Rhine, which was cut off from the rail network by the Emscher flood last summer, should be accessible to trains again next fall. An auxiliary bridge will be built over the Emscher by the 4th quarter of 2024, said a railroad spokeswoman. The operator of the port in Voerde recently warned that without the rail connection, jobs and a third of goods handling would be at risk. However, a temporary solution has now been found, said Managing Director Andreas Stolte. At the same time, he called for more speed in transport projects.
Following heavy rainfall at the end of June 2023, hundreds of meters of a dyke on the lower reaches of the Emscher near Dinslaken collapsed. The railroad bridge, over which eight freight trains a day normally travel to and from the port of Emmelsum, also collapsed.
Stolte explained that goods are currently being transported from the port of Emmelsum by truck to the neighboring Wesel city port and loaded onto the railroad there. "The situation at the moment is not nice, but we can live with it to some extent." However, the rail siding in Wesel is also regularly unusable because the railroad is expanding the Oberhausen-Emmerich line and this repeatedly leads to closures lasting several weeks. "We can't get away from the constant rail disruptions," emphasized the Managing Director of the port company DeltaPort.
By next autumn, the railroad wants to install a 66-metre-long auxiliary bridge on the Emscher, which was still in the federal government's inventory. This will close the gap to the port of Emmelsum again, the company announced. However, this is not a permanent solution. According to the railroad company, it is planning to build a new permanent bridge at the site - completion is expected in the mid-2030s. "Planning and approval procedures simply take an excessively long time in Germany," criticized Stolte.
The port of Emmelsum is located on the Rhine and the Wesel-Datteln Canal and is an important hub for cargo handling in the region.
Information about the port
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Source: www.stern.de
