Freight depot
A freight station (abbreviations: in Germany Gbf, in Switzerland GB; designation in Austria : Freight station , abbreviated Fbf) is understood in the broadest sense to be a railway system or its part on which no passenger traffic takes place, but only goods in any form from the road or loaded from the ship to the railroad or vice versa and / or rail freight wagons transferred to local sidings .
If the goods are not sent or received, but bimodally reloaded on the transport route between rail and another means of transport such as ship or truck or transferred between goods wagons of different gauges, one speaks of a transshipment station (Ubf). These are often created as container terminals in the context of combined transport . Such a transshipment station is also called a container terminal .
investment
Freight stations can
- directly next to a passenger station (either behind the platforms as seen from the reception building or directly behind the platforms or the passenger and goods stations),
- separated from the passenger station along one of the routes leaving it or
- be designed as stand-alone systems without any connection with a passenger station.
In single wagon traffic, the freight wagons intended for the individual freight yards are mostly delivered and picked up again from separate marshalling yards . In some cases, there are also combined shunting yards and freight yards.
equipment
For this purpose, the freight yard is usually equipped with a large number of stabling tracks and loading tracks . On the loading tracks there are either permanently installed loading aids (cranes, conveyor belts, etc.) that are installed for a short period of time (e.g. wheel loaders for distributing sugar beets ).
If the goods to be loaded are primarily containers, these freight yards are also known as container terminals (CT), on which special loading bridges, cranes and stacking vehicles ensure that the containers are loaded from the truck or ship to the wagons or back.
If only a small portion of the freight loading station - or stops used range, it will be as a loading point designated and has a separate driveway and signs. There is usually no facility available for loading the goods; the loading must be organized by the respective companies themselves (conveyor belts, truck cranes, etc.).
Such loading points are or were mostly to be found on branch lines, narrow-gauge railways and smaller train stations.
Medium-sized and larger freight yards also have or had mostly shunting tracks for distributing the trains that have arrived on the various local loading and sidings and for a simultaneous function as smaller junction stations , which in some mainly European countries were partially equipped with a drainage mountain .
photos
Freight station with track harp and trigger signals in Rostock , 1986
Container gantry crane at Dresden station, 1972
Structural change
Due to the progressive shift of freight traffic to the road , many freight yards and, as a result, marshalling yards have been and are still closed and then frequently broken up, so that it is no longer possible to resume rail freight transport at the same location. In other combined freight and junction stations with a drainage mountain, the latter was shut down when the station's junction function was abandoned while maintaining the local freight yard function. Furthermore, in most countries, general cargo traffic was completely shifted to the road, which resulted in the closure of the freight halls, and in the wagonload traffic most of the public loading streets and loading ramps of the freight yards were given up for small customers, so that most of the freight yards that are still in operation today are just left be used as container stations and / or transfer stations for siding.
See also
- Container terminal
- Mobile - truck-bound transshipment facility, can be used at every freight yard
- Uniform distance indicator for international freight traffic
- Main freight station
- Local goods facility
literature
- Otto Blum : Passenger and freight stations (= manual for civil engineering ). 2nd revised edition by Kurt Leibbrand . Springer, Berlin / Göttingen / Heidelberg 1961.
- Berthold Grau : Station design. Volumes 1 and 2. Transpress VEB Verlag for Transport, Berlin (East) 1968.
- Benno Wiesmüller, Dierk Lawrenz: The Hamburg marshalling yards and freight yards . EK, Freiburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-88255-303-1 .
