Chinese shipping giant COSCO introduced a new loading technology at its CSP Xiamen Ocean Gate Terminal, on China’s southeastern coast. A new railway located right next to the berth now allows for automated container transshipment, “addressing the ‘last-mile’ bottleneck in sea-rail logistics”, the company said.
Usually, moving containers from a ship to a train (or vice versa), is not a direct operation. When a ship is unloaded, containers sit in a storage yard before being placed on a train, and they usually need to be moved by truck to reach the rail infrastructure. COSCO’s new initiative will remove this obstacle, helping to make operations faster and cheaper.
By directly shifting between ship and train, logistics costs per container are reduced by over 15%, the Chinese company said on LinkedIn. Moreover, “the integration of automated rail and terminal operations allows for a 9-minute transfer, reducing total transit time by 2 to 3 days”, it added. The new infrastructure is designed to handle 250,000 TEUs and 250,000 tonnes of cargo per year.
The Xiamen Ocean Gate Terminal
The facility, located along the Taiwan Strait, is one of the most important sites managed by COSCO, and is also a hub for technological development. In addition to being China’s first terminal equipped with a ship-to-train automated system, it was also the first in the country to fully deploy 5G network and high-precision satellite positioning, back in 2020. It is also a vital location for Chinese exports. The terminal in Xiamen is linked to over 20 inland rail corridors in China and is part of 21 shipping lines connecting to most continents.
China leads in rail automation
COSCO’s project in Xiamen is not the first initiative aimed at automating rail operations in the country. Last year, China opened its first autonomous rail yard at the Suxi container terminal in Yuwi, southwest of Shanghai. Here, automated operations are ‘mixed’ with manual labour, including remote-controlled gantry cranes and automated storage systems.