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Rail freight in Hungary is already facing infrastructure constraints, and there is no doubt that urgent rail improvements are needed to serve the new car and battery factories, reports Világgazdaság.
The volume of car production will double in the next few years, said leading logistics experts at a transport logistics conference, where they stressed that the current rail infrastructure is not sufficient to serve the complexes under construction. At present, around 400,000 cars, Audis and Mercedes brands, are produced in Hungary every year, while BMW in Debrecen (eastern Hungary) and BYD in Szeged (southern Hungary), currently under construction, are both expected to produce another 200,000 cars a year. In the meantime, the capacity of existing plants will be upgraded.
There is already limited rail capacity, so the efforts to increase it are futile, but they cannot shift more traffic to rail at Audi’s factory in Győr (northwestern Hungary). Gábor Medgyasszay, head of inbound logistics at Audi Hungária Zrt., said that
they have problems with rail arrangements and transport schedules not only in Hungary, but also in Austria and Germany.”
The manufacturers have reached the limit, moving forward is impossible without infrastructure development, so they are now trying to switch to alternative fuels for road transport. However, there is no adequate infrastructure for this either, such as an LNG filling network for trucks.
“The BMW factory under construction in Debrecen also prefers rail transport,
but the traffic of the automotive and battery factories under construction is an impossible challenge for the Hungarian logistics infrastructure,”
said Bence Gyűrűs, managing director of DP World Hungary Logistics Kft., the logistics partner of BMW in Debrecen. There is no solution to the problem at the moment, and according to the expert, only the construction of the V0 railway line would help.
Battery factories in Hungary will supply two thirds of Europe’s battery needs in the coming years. However, investors in the Far East have so far provided little information on the future transport capacity needs of the factories, the experts told the forum. All that is certain is that both BMW and the CATL battery factory in Debrecen are planning to use the railways for both staff and freight transport, but the big question is how much of this they can achieve, said István Homoki, engineering team leader at Debrecen Infrastructure Development Ltd.
The main development focus should be on the immediate expansion and modernization of the rail network,
he underlined.
“The immediate start of the construction of the V0 railway line bypassing Budapest and the elimination of slow signals are particularly important to ensure that environmentally friendly inter-modal transport gains more and more ground and that the freight traffic on our already overloaded roads does not increase further,” stressed Koppány Ajtony Bíró, Secretary General of the Association of Hungarian Logistics Service Centers.
Via Világgazdaság, Featured image: Pixabay
