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Liverpool introduces Sunday evening opening for trucks

For Immediate Release - 20 June, 2007

The Port of Liverpool's Royal Seaforth Container Terminal has introduced an earlier start to the working week for delivery and collection of containers by road haulage.

The landside operation now begins at 10pm on Sunday evening instead of 6am on Monday morning, to reduce the dawn peak on the first day of the working week.

The Terminal last year attracted three new North Atlantic container services and is about to host the first ship on a new independent feeder service linking with the North European hubs of major lines. Volumes handled in 2006 rose by 20,000 teus, to a total annual box traffic of 645,000 teus.

With the new weekend start, the Liverpool terminal offers a continuous landside operation from 10pm on Sunday through to 3pm the following Saturday.

The extra working hours are just one facet of a programme of adjustments to enhance the terminal's performance, which are now being introduced by the Port of Liverpool's owners, Peel Ports Group.

Changes costing £4 million include...

• the recent introduction of three new straddle carriers and the placing of an order for another three, to give the terminal a total fleet of 35 machines...
• the creation of an extra 8 truck interchange bays...
• the provision of 20% more container park, providing another 1,000 ground slots...
• the establishment of an area with 3,000 teu ground slots for empty containers - freeing up space on the main container park...
• and the upgrading of the terminal's S6 Berth, including an order for a new ship-to-shore gantry crane, to enable the handling of deepsea as well as shortsea vessels.

Said Peel Ports Marketing Director Frank Robotham: "The measures now being put in place reflect the success of the Port of Liverpool in meeting the needs of our customers who are served by the road haulage industry. Increasingly, pressure is put on the speed and reliability of delivery of containers into and out of the customers premises and the extension of the opening hours of the terminal for hauliers is to help them meet these exacting demands."

Peel Ports has also successfully applied for a Harbour Revision Order to build a £90 million post-Panamax container terminal on the River Mersey, doubling the Port's container capacity to nearly 1.5 million teus. A detailed planning study is now under way. The development, close to the river mouth, will simultaneously accommodate two of the new generation of larger post-Panamax container ships.

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