Roland Spedition's new container block-train service links three Hamburg container terminals, CTA, CTB and EKOM/Eurogate with the Tricon Terminal in Nuremberg. Initially, southbound departures are on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from Hamburg, with availability in Nuremberg on Tuesdays from 10.00h, Thursdays from 06.00h and Fridays from 11.00h respectively.

Nikolaus Hirnschall of Roland Spedition explained that block trains for on-carriage from Nuremberg to Austria also transport empty containers to Linz, Enns, Vienna and Graz. “The round-trip service, Hamburg-Nuremberg-Austria-Hamburg, offers additional fast and environment-friendly transport capacity by rail on the Hamburg-Nuremberg leg, for import containers coming out of the Port of Hamburg en route to the economically-strong Nuremberg region.

"With the service from Nuremberg to Austria, we additionally offer our customers cost-effective empty container positioning."

Bavaria is the most important partner for container hinterland transport for the Port of Hamburg, accounting for around 750,000 TEU of traffic to/from Habmurg in 2015. The new Roland Spedition rail service increases the number of block train services between Hamburg and Nuremberg to 118, 62 on the import side and 56 on the export side.

In 2015 around 2.3M TEU were transported by rail over Hamburg, almost as many as the total for Antwerp, Rotterdam and Bremerhaven combined. More than 200 freight trains are cleared every day in Hamburg. Every week 268 block trains link Hamburg with the Bavarian terminals in Hof, Ingolstadt, Schweinfurt, Nuremberg, Munich, Regensburg, Augsburg, Burghausen, Wiesau and Bamberg.

The federal government is creating an important alternative to the heavily used North-South axis, Hamburg-Hannover-Würzburg, by upgrading the ‘Eastern Corridor’ line.