Industries in the Spotlight
24. 07. 2024
From raw materials such as gravel and speciality products such as salt to finished products such as concrete elements and plasterboard – the variety is enormous. Each product has its own requirements and transport is often preceded by years of lead times. Comprehensive expertise and special solutions are therefore required in logistics.
Building materials may appear simple at first glance, but their transport requires special attention. Peter Sorian, who has been with the railway since 1994, sees himself as a veteran of the industry. He started out as a dispatcher. Today, together with Georgina Babos, he is a segment manager. Georgina Babos joined the Rail Cargo Group (RCG) as a trainee in 2010 and has been involved with construction materials right from the start. When she became Segment Manager in 2019, she was succeeded by Kristina Klaric, Service Design Specialist. Together, they talk about the challenges and special features of transporting building materials.
Georgina: We transport both raw building materials and finished products by rail. Raw materials include, for example, slag, limestone, clay, kaolin gravel and clinker for cement production. Finished products include concrete elements, plasterboard, and tiles, which are also used at home. We also transport raw materials for the paper industry, such as slurry – a liquid calcium carbonate – or kaolin, which is used as a filler in the paper industry. This is used to glue the wood fibres. We also handle speciality products such as sulphur or salt for the food industry.
Peter: Because these materials, such as calcium carbonate and salt, come from the mining industry. Due to the large number of different products, we also need special transport containers for almost every product. We always say that we are the RCG's vendor's tray. Our portfolio ranges from flat wagons to tank wagons, including powder wagons and container wagons.
Georgina: Often very long! Especially for major projects such as the Brenner Base Tunnel, in which we have been involved since 2007. These projects require comprehensive planning and coordination – often over decades – in order to guarantee just-in-time transport.
Peter: Gravel, for example, is a so-called “unintelligent” product. This means that it has a low value of goods and usually only needs to be transported over short distances. In any case, it is almost always a just-in-time project, because trucks are waiting on the back of the line to handle or reload the container for delivery or further processing. In addition, our time slots are orientated towards passenger transport. They are therefore just-in-time transports because every mode of transport has to be coordinated and we can't really afford any delays here.
Peter: Definitely the Brenner Base Tunnel, precisely because it was so complex. We've been working on it since 2007. All three of us have been working on it – some of us for almost our entire professional lives.
Georgina: I did the first calculation in 2012, back then in the Service Design department. Peter supported it on the sales side and Kristina then took over my former job and is still doing calculations for the same project.
Kristina: So far almost 600,000 tonnes of segments, i.e. concrete elements and 170,000 tonnes of pearl gravel for backfilling the segment walls.
Peter: Pearl gravel falls under special ballast. The gravel must not absorb the water that runs out of the mountain, otherwise it would lead to the growth of stalactites and at some point, the water would no longer be able to drain away. Pearl gravel only occurs in the Pannonian Plates. Around Austria, there are only very few pits that come into question, such as Hegyeshalom and Janossomorja in Hungary. It is therefore possible that such special gravel travels over longer distances.
Peter: Because we have just-in-time concepts, we have to run very punctually and adapt our concepts to the given infrastructure. A big issue is that fewer and fewer customers are building new sidings, and we use what I call pop-up hubs instead. So, if there is no siding, we rely on multimodal transport and therefore need space and access options for the truck.
Peter: Yes, there are: for example, the cement industry, one of our biggest customers, is currently undergoing a major transformation process to become CO2 neutral. Today, the cement industry is responsible for six per cent of CO2 emissions worldwide. To reduce this, the proportion of clinker, a primary product in the cement industry, is to be reduced. Clinker is obtained by burning limestone. This is then ground and mixed with additives to produce cement. If the proportion of clinker is reduced, the cement industry can save a considerable amount of CO2. However, this also changes the entire logistics. There are many opportunities for us, and we want to be involved in this process right from the start.
More information:
