12.09.2022

Dear Business Partner,
 
As we informed you in our Newsletters No. 119/2022 and 121/2022 on 06.09.2022 and 09.09.2022, we were forced to revise our surcharges.

!NEW SURCHARGE !  Port Congestion Surcharge (PCS)

As we have already preannounced, the continuing situation of repeatedly congested ports in Europe has a significant impact on the costs spent on ensuring our service. Therefore, with effect from 01.10.2022, we are forced to implement a new Port Congestion Surcharge in this regard. 
 
Unfortunately, last weekend showed again how sensitive the transportation within Europe was. In the direction to Northern Europe, based on the information shared by DB Netze, the whole traffic was stopped on Saturday afternoon. For METRANS it means that 25 trains have been affected – some of them en route to Germany, some of them during the process of loading at our terminals. We can only now proceed with planning a restart of the weekend´s non-performance.
 
Due to an accident in the Adriatic, two days of production are absent.
 
To describe the details and the effects of the situation, once more, we would like to summarise some of the reasons for the introduction of this surcharge:
 

• Recent port situations all across Europe and the resulting slower port operations have further increased the volume of backlogs, which is further impacting port terminal congestion

• Disruption and changes of slots at ports have a strong impact on the subsequent rail transport as well as on the inland terminals where container shipments heading to and from the ports are processed

• The possibilities of arriving trains at individual terminals are also affected by additional restrictions announced by individual terminals (e.g. limiting the timeliness of the arrival of containers at the terminal prior to vessel departures, or an order for a balanced container flow –  delivered versus collected)

• Delayed and irregularly arriving vessels, while these irregularities make it nearly impossible to plan the circulation of railway sets realistically, as in many cases such delays or irregularities are communicated with minimal time in advance

• In order to ensure the additional railway capacity in addition to “stuck trains on the track” (railway carriages, locomotives, train conductors, …) necessary for dispatching individual trains, it is necessary to count with incurring additional costs

• Overloading of the port infrastructure as a result of “dispositional train management” causes an accumulation of trains not only in the area of ​​individual ports, but trains are also stopped along the entire route and far inland; all of them, including these related restrictions, cause additional costs for the operation of our trains, also due to related fees when changing the mode of transport, as well as personnel costs related to changing the circulation time of railway sets

• Further growing in balances in the time and direction which is leading to the fact that – to secure the cargo flows – we are forced to send empty rail cars to or from the ports; at this stage mostly import is in disbalance, which can be partly solved only by ad-hoc trains which have to be covered with higher costs and longer transit times.

The current amount of port congestion surcharge with effect from 01.10.2022 can be found HERE.

This surcharge applies to every shipment from/to the listed ports, regardless of the final inland destination.

The decisive date for the calculation of the port congestion surcharge for import transportations is the date of departure of the train from the port and for export transportations the date of departure of the train from the terminal to the port.

We continue to monitor and evaluate the situation and we will inform you of any changes.

Thank you for understanding.

METRANS Team