Frankfurt For DB Cargo, the freight subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn, the Automotive Logistic Center right next to the Mercedes-Benz plant in Bremen could be a glimpse of the future. DB Cargo CEO Sigrid Nikutta and Jörg Burzer, Member of the Board of Management of the Mercedes-Benz Group, officially opened the loading facility on Monday morning. The facility has been in operation since last year, but DB Cargo is now delivering battery systems there for the Mercedes EQE, the new all-electric limousine from the Stuttgart-based company.
Coal and steel have long been important transport goods for the railways, in the future it will be battery systems. Freight transport by rail is changing in parallel with the technological change at major customers. “We are proud that Mercedes-Benz not only entrusts us with the delivery of new vehicles to all European countries, but also with supplying the plants with the new heart of the electric car – the drive batteries,” said Cargo boss Nikutta. A freight train can carry the freight of up to 52 trucks.
The battery business is still small. But the freight subsidiary of the rail company sees great potential here. DB Cargo has been supplying the VW plant in Zwickau with batteries since summer 2020. The ID.3 and ID.4 are built there. The battery systems, for example, come from the LG Chem plant in Poland. Bit by bit, the state-owned company wants to integrate the battery production sites in Germany and neighboring countries into the so-called Railnet, DB Cargo’s network for major industrial customers.
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Many companies have set themselves the goal of becoming climate-neutral. Not only do they have to because of political requirements, investors also demand it. Mercedes-Benz, for example, has set itself the goal of being completely climate-neutral by 2039.
This means that the production and all upstream processes should then no longer emit any climate-damaging substances. “The CO2-neutral transport logistics is an important step on our way to a climate-neutral vehicle fleet and its production,” said Burzer on Monday.
But the challenges are just as great as the opportunities for DB Cargo. The battery systems are built and assembled at the Hedelfingen plant, loaded onto the freight train there and transported more than 650 kilometers to Bremen. You are already subpoenaed.
“Batteries aren’t exactly light, they are delicate to handle and have to be transported carefully until they reach the assembly line,” Nikutta knows. Coal could be loaded into freight cars relatively easily, batteries had to be handled and transported with care. A single system weighs around half a ton.
The freight railway experts are familiar with sensitive freight from the chemical industry. It is legally obliged to transport particularly sensitive substances by rail. However, depending on the type of battery, completely new requirements can be placed on rail logistics.
Goods wagons will need electricity in the future
The battery systems must be monitored. For example, they react with water. If necessary, they must also be cooled. This requires electricity, which has not previously been available on freight cars. The problem is to be solved, among other things, by the so-called digital clutch. They not only make it faster to assemble trains. It also supplies the wagons with energy.
This is also important for another product that the experts at DB Cargo have in mind: hydrogen. The “fuel of the future” will then have to be transported over very long distances. The rail is one of the options for this. But hydrogen is a much more sensitive cargo than batteries.
Handling the new sensitive products is not the only challenge. The freight subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn also undertakes to deliver the battery systems to within 15 minutes of the timetable. Because the processes after unloading are closely timed. The lithium-ion batteries are temporarily stored in Bremen either in trailers or in a battery hall, or they go directly to production. DB Cargo therefore has to deliver just in time, as no large warehouse is to be set up.
In view of the many bottlenecks in the German rail network, this is anything but trivial. In autumn of last year, the freight trains of DB Cargo and private freight railways sometimes had to wait many hours before they could continue. It was downright chaos.
Ronald Pofalla, who is responsible for infrastructure on the Deutsche Bahn board, has promised that this will not happen again. Measures on the construction sites and the needs of train operations should be better coordinated. But the amount that DB Netz wants to build this year alone suggests that there will be many bottlenecks again. The railways, the federal government and the states want to invest 13.6 billion euros in the rail infrastructure, another 900 million euros more than in 2021.
But DB Cargo boss Nikutta has no choice but to lure customers with more reliability. Above all, she wants to bring the freight subsidiary out of the red through higher productivity, i.e. volume growth. The offshoot had made an operating loss of 728 million euros in 2020. In the first half of 2021, the operating loss was 211 million euros.
More volume means attracting new business or, as in the case of the car manufacturers, expanding existing business relationships. This only works if the goods are transported as planned. This also applies to Deutsche Post/DHL customers. The logistics company launched deeper cooperation with DB Cargo last October to increase the meager share of just two percent of parcels transported by rail.
In addition, there will be seven more connections for the parcel trains in the future. At the same time, Deutsche Post wants to provide further parcel centers with a siding. However, the project will only succeed if the freight trains arrive extremely punctually and can be loaded for onward transport. Here, DB Cargo has only promised a time buffer of five minutes.
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