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Anyone entering a rail yard in the port area has specific requirements to comply with. Unfortunately, the reality is that in many yards, these requirements and resulting rules of conduct are not, or not well enough, observed by yard users.

The Suurhoff Bridge in the Port of Rotterdam area spans the Hartel Canal. The bridge consists of a separate railway bridge and a separate road traffic bridge with interdependencies and was built between 1972-1973. Defects have recently been found on the road bridge. Following this, the railway bridge was also investigated. This survey revealed that this bridge has defects. Moreover, the railway bridge has problems with stiffness and corrosion.

ProRail looks back at 2022. We zoom in on the subject of rail freight and reflect on performance in the Sea-to-Zevenaar area.

What does the future of sustainable mobility look like? What do we want? What challenges do we see and how can we solve them with technological innovations? What needs to be done now to continue future growth?

Shunting with hazardous goods can again take place at Pernis rail yard. This means that the yard has returned to full operation. Since 1 January 2023, handling of trains and wagons with hazardous substances was temporarily not possible.

Persistent rain has caused considerable inconvenience recently. Not only for road traffic, but also on the rail freight tracks in the Port of Rotterdam.

Contractors Swietelsky (Botlek and Europoort), BAM (Waalhaven-Zuid) and Dura Vermeer (Maasvlakte West/West-West and Pernis) carried out this work. On behalf of ProRail, Dura Vermeer will continue working on the fire extinguishing facilities at Pernis yard in the coming weeks; during this period, no freight trains carrying hazardous substances will be shunting here. This affects about seventy freight trains a week. We will try to reroute these as best we can.

ProRail’s Infrastructure in Order programme team regularly takes a number of administrative supply chain partners to the Rotterdam harbour area. A visit to rail freight yards like Kijfhoek and Waalhaven-Zuid provides insight into the complexity of the area where ProRail is working on the construction of infrastructure such as new fire-fighting facilities.

No trains are running between Breda and Roosendaal on Wednesday 14 September due to a fire that broke out on a train loaded with cars. The fire is now under control and our incident response colleagues are at the scene to clear the track again as quickly as possible. How the fire could have started is still unclear.