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Posted by westhaven1 on August 10th, 2010
We seem to be gaining something of a reputation amongst aircraft enthusiasts since we’ve recently shipped a vintage monoplane from the USA to the UK, a glider from Southampton to Baltimore and a small passenger aeroplane from Dubai to France.
The vintage aeroplane was an early 20th century Ryan monoplane which is to be returned to its former glory by a Midlands based aircraft enthusiast. The glider was shipped on a RoRo service from England to the USA for a British pilot who was keen to experience the wide open skies of North America, and we have just shipped a small Cessna from Dubai, via the UK to mid-western France , where the owner has a new home on a converted airfield and can taxi his plane from his own driveway onto the runway and into the blue…
Vintage Ryan wings Vintage Ryan fuselage & wheels
Packed and ready From Dubai to France – via Felixstowe
to go – by sea
What the Ryan might look like when restored.
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Posted by admin on May 10th, 2010
While I was in India I wanted to make sure I really understood how freight was moved around the country, as well as how it could be shipped out of there. In the last article I talked about the expansion of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust in Mumbai, but in a country the size of India, even getting things to port can be a logistical challenge. As a result of the under-developed trade and logistics infrastructure, the logistics cost of the Indian economy is over 13% of GDP, in comparison to less than 10% of GDP in most of Western Europe and North America. Rail freight accounts for 40% of freight moved around India, compared to 89% in 1951
Currently the majority of freight in India goes by road, and the improved highways being built to supply ports like the JNPT will begin to make this even more efficient (although efficient is a relative term..!)
There has been a huge investment in the road network in India over the past half century. Despite the fact that a freight train (or ‘rake’) can carry 90 TEU’s or 3000 tons of bulk material, for journeys less than 450 miles it is still more economical to move containers by road – but the railways are working on an enormous fightback to regain some lost ground. Indian Railways makes 70% of its revenues and most of its profits from the freight sector, and uses these profits to cross-subsidise the loss-making passenger sector.
Anyone who has ever been to India or even seen a documentary about the country will already be familiar with the experience that is travelling by train, with passengers hanging onto the outside of the carriages and hawkers selling their wares whenever the train slows to a pace that they can keep up with. Trains began to appear in the mid 19th Century, set up by private companies with the assistance of the ever present East India Company, but by 1907 nearly all of the companies had been nationalised and in 1920 railway finances were considered so important that they were ring-fenced with a separate budget to keep them away from the rest of the financial negotiations that any government has to contend with. Indeed the Indian rail system is immense, it’s the worlds largest employer with a workforce of 1.6m and it carries 15 million people and more than a million tonnes of freight every day over routes that cover nearly 40,000 miles – and it’s about to get even bigger.
A further 1,650 miles of track are planned for the exclusive use of freight transport with an additional 3,000 miles feeder lines that will include some new construction and the upgrade of many existing lines. The plan is to provide dedicated freight lines that can isolate the freight from the passenger trains, increasing the capacity for both sections and slashing the amount of time that it takes to get goods across the country to export.
The first phase of the Dedicated Freight Corridor is the Western Corridor which will run from the JNPT in Mumbai to New Delhi. As you would expect from a line that goes straight to one of the fastest growing container ports in the world the Western Corridor is expected to carry mainly container traffic, and lots of it, with trains up to a mile long, double stacked with TEUs. The Eastern Corridor will run from Ludhiana to Sonnagar and is planned to eventually to join up with the deep water docks at Kolkata carrying coal finished steel, food grains, cement, fertilizers, and lime stone.
As well as the construction of the lines themselves there is a lot of work to be done to make sure that the tracks fit into the existing infrastructure, with the demolition of 30 Road Over-Bridges (or ROBs) and construction of another 150 with approximately 900 level crossings to enable travel across the lines.
While the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laid the foundation for the Western Corridor in October, the Eastern Corridor may have hit a bit of a stumbling block. Both sections were due to be funded by the Japanese government, most likely through the Japanese Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) in the form of an aid or a soft loan, and the Rs 16,000 crore deal (about £2billion) for the Western Corridor is still on track (if you will excuse the pun). But it seems that Japan is getting nervous about the spiralling costs for the Eastern Corridor (currently projected at Rs 11,000 crore, which is about £1.5billion) partly due to the increased cost in buying the land needed to lay the tracks and is looking for an opt out on that side of the project, but also because it has more interest in the fast turn around of the container freight than the industrial commodities that would be moved along the Eastern Corridor.
In response to this The Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Limited (DFCC), the company set up to manage the project, are looking into the possibility of implementing toll charges (similar to those used on highways in the country) to fund the project, the cost of the toll would vary depending on the type of goods being moved.
The entire project is expected to take 5-7 years to complete and is set to have a significant impact on many areas of Indian industry. On the Western Corridor it will mean journey times from New Delhi to Mumbai are cut from 60 to 36 hours, with trains travelling at up to 60mph, leading to a faster turnaround, and lower transport costs making Indian goods more competitive worldwide. Container traffic alone on the Western Corridor is anticipated to increase from 0.69 million TEUs in 2005-06 to 6.2 million TEUs in 2021-22.
On the Eastern Corridor the coal and steel are mostly raw materials destined for the industrial areas and power stations in the northern area or Uttar Pradesh with traffic projected to grow from 52 million tonnes in 2005-06 to 142 million tonnes in 2021-22 providing the resources for a massive expansion in capacity.
The DFC is the single largest infrastructural project being undertaken in India, at enormous public cost, but it is being backed by inward investment from some equally enormous corporate bodies. At this point I must express my gratitude to Ashok Gupta, Director of the Indian Roadways Corporation Ltd, one of the most well established and respected road operators in India, who kindly arranged a meeting for me with the CEO of ETA Freightstar, Mr Sathianathan. ETA Freightstar is an Indian Division of the huge Dubai based ETA Group, a company with 140 branches in 21 countries employing over 48,000 people with an annual turnover of $4 Billion. ETA are one of the first private companies on the scene and are extending the network where the DFC ends by providing road freight to and from the rail network an handling to get the freight onto the rakes themselves, making the Dedicated Freight Corridor all the more efficient as a way of shipping goods around the country.
By upping their game the road freight groups are going to have to try to improve their efficiency to be able to compete, and by separating the passenger and freight aspects of Indian Railways both will be able to develop at a much faster rate.
This article is copyrighted John Cave 2008
Contact us now to discuss your requirements on +44(0)121 713 7250 or by email for seafreight (Click Here) or airfreight (Click Here)
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Posted by admin on May 10th, 2010
In part one I briefly mentioned the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust, the enormous complex of container terminals that handle over 60% of all sea freight that comes in and goes out of India. At the moment JNPT serves 25 ICDs (inland container depots), with plans for another 9 over the next few years. The port sees textiles, foodstuffs and medicines exported worldwide while at the same time chemicals, oils, petrol, plastics and heavy machinery are imported to aid the phenomenal growth in the Indian manufacturing economy.
JNPT is made up of 3 terminals: Gateway Terminals India is a container port with the capacity to process 1.3m TEUs a year, there is also a liquid cargo jetty capable of handling 5.5 million tonnes annually (including industrial and edible cargo such as molasses and vegetable oil), and finally the Nhava Sheva International Container Terminal, India’s first private port.
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We were fortunate enough to have an extensive tour of the facilities at Nhava Sheva, facilities that rival those anywhere else in the world (and I’ve seen a lot of container ports in my time…!). With the capacity for 100 moves per hour I was impressed by the efficiency of the operation, I was even more impressed when the CEO, Capt Rustom Dastoor, mentioned that they are on target to move 1,400,000 TEUs by the end of the year.
For those of you who don’t speak logistics jargon, a TEU is a ‘twenty-foot equivalent unit’ – a container that is about 20ft by about 8ft. At the moment the TEU is the standard size of container, there are a smaller number of 10ft containers in use, and an increasing number of 40ft containers, these are sometimes referred to as 2 TEUs or logically FEUs. If all of the containers that NSICT moved in 2007 were laid side by side and end to end they would cover over 8 sq miles of land. To put it another way, if you were stood in the centre of this sea of containers, you wouldn’t be able to see the edge. By 2015 JNPT as a whole is expecting to be handing 8m TEUs a year – That’s 43 sq miles of containers. If you were driving at 30mph it would take you over 5 and a half hours just to drive round the perimeter.
To prepare for this, as well as the work I mentioned on the roads supplying the port, hundreds of crores (in India 1 crore = 10 million) of Rupees are being spent on expanding the container berth, improving the rail network to the ICDs and digging out the harbour channel so that it is deeper and wider to accommodate the ever expanding size of the ships that carry the containers all over the world. They are also planning a 4th terminal that will be bigger than the rest of JNPT put together.
Aerial view of NSCIT Terminal and Gateway To India Terminal
But the Nhava Sheva terminal isn’t just some multinational company moving in and exploiting the natural resources of the area, they also have a real sense of what corporate social responsibility means. Many of the staff are recruited from the surrounding villages and given training above and beyond what is needed to carry out their day to day jobs. In addition to this DP world, the company that manages NSICT has also adopted the local community college with work beginning this summer on a new school building which will include science labs and a library.
Congestion is still a problem at JNPT though. The average container can wait up to 7 days to clear the port complex due to the sheer volume of containers being processed. Cargo throughput surged 26.4% in the 1st seven months of fiscal 2007/8 to 2,700,000 TEU across the three terminals and JNPT and Customs officials are looking at ways to cut down the waiting times while maintaining this phenomenal growth.
It is this sort of dual progress which is propelling India into the forefront of international trade, providing not only world class facilities but a world class workforce to run them to a world class standard.
All text copyright John Cave 2007
Contact us now to discuss your requirements on +44(0)121 713 7250 or by email for seafreight (Click Here) or airfreight (Click Here)
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