PORTtalk Hamburg: Holger Dechant on the Universal Port of Hamburg

The importance of the Port of Hamburg for logistics companies is indisputable. With 7,000 ship calls per year, around 300 berths for ocean-going vessels, four container terminals, three cruise terminals, and a wide variety of handling facilities, the Port of Hamburg is one of the world’s most efficient universal ports.

This is why a GRUBER Logistics office is located in Hamburg, almost as a matter of course, in order to benefit, among other things, from the close connection to the Port of Hamburg. The Port of Hamburg invited Holger Dechant, Director of the Heavy & Special Transport Business Unit at GRUBER Logistics, to its regular format “PORTtalk live” to discuss the situation of Hamburg’s universal port with other guests.

GRUBER Logistics XTL: The Transport of 25 Locomotives

Among other things, Holger Dechant discusses the transport of 25 locomotives, which were first shipped from the manufacturer in Kassel to the Port of Hamburg and from there to New Jersey in the United States. This example clearly demonstrates that such logistically demanding, heavy, and oversized transports can only be handled with the expertise of GRUBER Logistics.

The weight of a single locomotive is 200 tons, and the train combinations, measuring 60 meters long, 4 meters wide, and 4.55 meters high, could not be moved to the Port of Hamburg by rail; GRUBER Logistics had to transport them by road.

However, the speed of German permit procedures could be improved for road transport, and deteriorating bridges as well as a lack of reliability in roadwork completion times also made transport conditions more difficult. Ultimately, GRUBER Logistics still delivered the 25 locomotives reliably, allowing them to be loaded safely onto vessels at the Port of Hamburg.

In addition to exceptional operations in heavy and oversized transport, GRUBER Logistics also guarantees a highly reliable groupage transport service between Italy and Germany, with daily departures to key German industrial areas — a tangible example of our operational excellence in distribution.

Further details on the transport of the 25 locomotives can be found in the current issue of “Universalhafen”, the magazine of the Port of Hamburg.

More information on our GRUBER Logistics XTL services is available here on our homepage.