Port of Trelleborg is Scandinavia’s largest RoRo port as well as the Baltic Sea’s largest railway port. A new train gate and inspection facility for intermodal railway wagons have been installed and is in operation at one of the port’s intermodal terminals where most of the arrivals and departures by railway units passing Port of Trelleborg are handled. This is part of the change work going on in the port to modernize, automate and streamline.
Before the new train gate the train wagons were pulled in the terminal by a train and parked. The combi staff then began inspecting all the units on the wagons and reported any detected damage into the terminal system. The inspection was first done on one side of the line of wagons and then the staff climbed over a wagon and inspected the other side. This was very time consuming and was a physical strain on the staff. The risk of injury is fairly high when climbing the wagons especially in bad weather. The ocular inspection was made without any problems during the day but was quite difficult to perform at night in the dark. No inspection of the units from above was possible.
Although the railway units were physically located in the port, they were not visible in the terminal system. They were marked as active only when the combi operator unloaded the unit from the wagon.
The solution with the train gate is an image and identification system that photographs and identifies railway units and wagons with the aim of automating and inspecting traffic passing the terminal via train. All railway units that pass through the train portal are being photographed from all directions and all relevant data is identified and presented in a screen overview for the operator at Trelleborg Port Control (TPC) and stored in the gate system. This information becomes available both to the port’s staff but also to the port’s customers via a web interface.
The handling of railway units has become considerably more efficient and means a significant improvement of the working environment at the terminal, since no inspection of the combi staff is necessary after the implementation of the train gate.
The train gate is one of the activities in the EU project ”2016-EU-TM-0290-M-Sweden-Poland Sustainable Sea-Hinterland Services III” which is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union. The project extends between 2017-2019.
Photo: Camco, the train gate in Port of Trelleborg