DB Schenker Rail is adding another weekly train to its service between Wroclaw in Poland and London in the UK from October this year. The company has been running one weekly train on the service since November last year but has seen increasing demand from customers across a number of sectors, including the automotive industry.

General Motors and Volkswagen are among the carmakers that company provides services for in Poland and its UK customers include Ford, BMW and Jaguar.

Starting in October, trains will be leaving Barking, near London, for Poland on Tuesday and Fridays, with departures in the other direction on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The trains need about 50 hours for the route, which is roughly 2,000km long.

The new service will help to save around 3,700 truck journeys and over 135,000kms a year on the roads said the company.

“This is our response to the increasing demand from customers,” said Alexander Hedderich, chairman of DB Schenker Rail. “We have successfully established a new transport corridor within DB Schenker Rail's pan-European network. At the same time, we are also demonstrating the growing possibilities for long-distance European freight transport, with the shift of goods to environmentally friendly rail freight."

High Speed 1 (HS1), which connects the Channel tunnel with London Barking, is the only route in the United Kingdom that permits European loading gauges. This means that the trains can be loaded with European sized curtain-sided swap bodies, which provide an internal height of three metres, allowing two standard pallets to be stacked on top of each other and maximizing the amount of product per train.

DB Schenker Rail plans to expand services on the corridor as the market develops.  

Last month the company announced that it will be providing rail services at the new London Gateway deepsea port and logistics park being developed by DP World, which is due to open in the UK in the fourth quarter of next year. The logistics park, which is 40kms east of London, is heralded as being Europe’s biggest when it opens and is likely to become the UK's busiest rail freight terminal.

DB Schenker Rail will operate freight trains over 700 metres in length from London Gateway, amongst the longest in the UK.

DB Schenker Rail will introduce at least four rail freight services a day in and out of the park, subject to volumes, and will serve a range of inland terminals including potential new UK locations. Additional rail freight services will be introduced in the future.

The trains will avoid over 4,000 lorry movements per week from the UK roads.