Port of Koper: Gateway to Asia

Luka Koper was founded in 1957 and is therefore one of the younger ports in Europe, but can still compete with the historic harbours of the Adriatic: The port in Koper, built by the former Yugoslavia to compete with Trieste just 30 kilometres to the north, covers an area of 288 hectares - including around 518,000 m2 of closed warehouses, 47,000 m2 of covered storage and 117 hectares of open-air storage. Up to 203,000 m3 of bulk cargo can be stored here. The harbour also has 38 km of track and 3,475 m of quays. In addition to its industrial importance, the harbour area is home to the “Škocjanski zatok” nature reserve, the largest semi-saline wetland in Slovenia.

Expansion of rail infrastructure

In 2023, around 52 per cent of freight was transported on goods trains. The good rail connection is also what makes the port of Koper so attractive for many Central European countries. For Austria too, as its location at the northern end of the Adriatic Sea and thus to the Suez Canal makes it the most important southern port connecting Central Europe and Eastern Asia as well as the Asian mainland areas of Southeast Asia between China and India. The opening of the Semmering Base Tunnel in 2030 will further strengthen the connection to Koper via the Southern Route. For its part, the port of Koper has been working for years on the construction of a second track on the Divača-Koper section. This is intended to create a high-frequency connection to the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) and eliminate current bottlenecks. Commissioning is planned for 2026.

Direct TransFER to Koper

RCG offers regular TransFER connections from and to Koper. Both containers and conventional shipments such as sawn timber, paper, building materials, consumer goods, cars and mineral oil are transported. For example, to Villach with currently four to five round trips per day (conventional) and five round trips per week (intermodal). The RCG team also takes care of the entire port logistics on site with supporting services such as distribution organisation, loading, unloading and reloading, pre- and on-carriage, load securing, weighing, cross-docking, handling options and warehouse logistics, consignment documents preparation and customs services. 
In 2023, a total of 1,478 trains and 24,700 wagons were transported conventionally to and from Koper. The majority of these were operated in own traction, with our own locomotives and staff. The rest is operated by partner subcontractors. In the container segment, a total of 1,066,093 TEU were handled in the port of Koper in 2023. Of this, the RCG share was 87,334 TEU, which were transported with 1,144 RCG intermodal trains.
 

Would you like to find out more about our TransFER connections?

Our TransNET shows you all of our TransFER connections at a glance – just have a click around, try it out and explore the possibilities!