RailFreight.com — 2023-04-19
Land transportation
A new intermodal railway terminal will open in Szeged, on the Hungarian border crossing with Serbia. The facility, called PSP Terminal and is currently under construction, will be up and running in 2023 September to facilitate the shift from road to rail.
The initiative for the PSP Terminal came from Hungarian freight company Petrolsped Szallitmanyozasi, which will finance the project with roughly €540,000. The area around the Szeged-Horgos border crossing between Hungary and Serbia is seeing an increasing amount of projects for rail terminals. Two of the latest examples are a project launched by METRANS in Szeged, which is expected to be operative by 2025, and the so-called Horgos Terminal, on the Serbian side of the border.
The PSP Terminal
The facility is expected to pick up road traffic, especially from Serbia but also Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, and move those volumes on the railways to ship the further north in Hungary and the Europe. Estimates from Petrolsped Szallitmanyozasi claim that the PSP Terminal will help to remove 60,000 trucks from Hungarian roads every year. The facility, as the company explained, will relieve some pressure from the terminals in Budapest and the one in Curtici, near the Romanian border, which handle most of the cargo on the north-south axis.
The terminal will cover a surface of 4,8 hectares. It will be equipped to handle three pairs of trains up to 650 metres in length every day and will be suitable for non-craneable semi-trailers. First and last-mile services for transportation to and from the terminal will be available as well. Moreover, there will be a section dedicated to repairing the tarpaulins of semi-trailers and damaged containers.
The PSP Terminal project was announced by Petrolsped Szallitmanyozasi at the general assembly of the Association of Hungarian Logistics Service Centers on 2023 April 18. The facility will be located in the former Rolling Highway (ROLA) transshipment area in Kiskundorozsma, east of the Szeged. Two trains used to hop on the ROLA every day until 2012 when state funds were cut and traffic stopped.