General Cargo
Pier II is the heart of general cargo handling. Here are mainly metals, forest products and project cargo as well as container handled. But Pier II is mainly characterized by the transshipment of wind turbines.
Cranes with a lifting capacity of up to 100 tonnnes ensure the fast handling of goods. Since mid-2019, it is possible to load goods of up to almost 300 tonnes by using two new mobile harbour cranes in tandem. Furthermore, there are two cranes available for loading and unloading at berth 16, which can be equipped with hooks or grapples. Here, among other things, sheet metal and pipes for EEW Special Pipe Construction GmbH are handled.
Three solid sheds, each 360 meters long, with land and water-side track and road connections, are used for transhipment and storage. A total of 600,000 square meters of open storage and 120,000 square meters of covered storage for general cargo are available at the Rostock seaport.
High & Heavy
With berths 10, 15 and 25, the port offers three berths for the handling of particularly large and heavy goods. At berth 15, the heavy-duty areas are upgraded by ROSTOCK PORT GmbH. This is where a special quay with a heavy-duty rail track was built for a Liebherr crane with a lifting capacity of up to 1,600 tonnes, which put into Operation mid of 2019. This will improve the possibilities for handling extremely heavy project cargo as well as the attractiveness of the location for further company relocations for the production and assembly of heavy cargo.
Container
We have been able to record a very positive trend in container handling. This growth is in particular driven by the containers carried on the Silk Road between China and Europe by rail and by ship between Kaliningrad and Rostock. This prevents long waiting times at the border between Belarus and Poland and thus assures a high reliability and short transportation times for the goods, most of which are capital-intensive.
While this traffic started with one train per week from Xi’an in April 2020 it has been running in both directions since the middle of last year. With every container vessel arriving in port, up to five trains are currently loaded at the General Cargo Terminal. In this traffic Rostock Overseas port acts not just as a place of transhipment, but also as a collecting and distribution centre. All in all 23 countries are being served at the European end so far, with Italy and northern Europe representing the main source and destination points of these established regular services.
Via Rostock as a hub the China traffic is currently connected, for instance, to the Ruhr area, the Netherlands, northern Europe, Italy and the Czech Republic.