Somerton Business Park, Victoria

Somerton Rail Strategy

Organisations that have an integrated rail strategy will benefit from significant opportunities to reduce their transport costs and gain a significant strategic advantage for general product distribution. Austrak Business Park tenants with significant and predictable freight volumes are in a strong position to negotiate attractive rates with rail operators.

Key attributes of rail include:

• Rail is the most cost effective mode of transport for inter-capital containerised freight movements.
• Rail is considerably more energy efficient than road transport; therefore, reducing Australia’s dependence on oil imports.
• Rail is a smarter economic choice for freight haulage for Australia. One freight train from Melbourne to Sydney replaces 150 semi-trailers, saving 45,000 litres of fuel on every journey.
• Rail can assist in relieving road congestion in metropolitan areas.
• Rail is up to 9 times safer than road freight.

Rail Terminal – Operational Methodology

The Somerton Rail Terminal has been designed and constructed as an open access, common user, modern and efficient terminal offering six tracks of 750 meters in length (4 dual gauge and 2 standard gauge), providing for efficient and flexible train operations.

The rail operations comprise of Port Shuttle trains between the Port of Melbourne and Somerton and Interstate trains connecting Somerton and all state Capital cities and major regional rail terminals on the ARTC National Standard Gauge Rail and the Victorian broad gauge rail network.

The Somerton terminal incorporates a modern container park facility with a 10,000 TEU capacity designed to handle both full and empty containers and will incorporate all requisite container repair and upgrade facilities, road and rail transport booking systems, local transport pick up and delivery service, container hire and dehire on site, 24hr, 7 day operations, AQIS and Customs services.

Access to the terminal is managed through a state of the art gatehouse facility incorporating three B-triple weighbridges, and incorporates a Rail Terminal security system controlled from the gatehouse ensuring integrity and security of product stored on site.

POTA are experienced and professional terminal operators. The range of services provided will include loading and unloading of trains, management of the container park, transport and shuttle services linking tenants on the Business Park directly to the terminal thus providing tenants seamless integration with all requisite rail and shipping and container requirements. Alternatively tenants have total flexibility to make their own transport arrangements for containers to and from their site.

Somerton Multi-Modal Freight Terminal (MMFT)

The Austrak Multi-Modal Freight Terminal is operated by POTA and provides the following benefits and opportunities to Business Park tenants:

• The MMFT is strategically placed to improve efficiency in transporting goods along the Hume corridor where freight task when expressed as tonnes per kilometres dominates the total road freight transported in Victoria and Nationally each year.
• Located north of Melbourne CBD and ideally positioned in close proximity to many of the major retailers in regional Victoria
• Furnish opportunities for maximum weight capability of import & export containers by rail mode into and from the Port of Melbourne and other Australian Ports.
• Facilitate the consolidation of product between the various (business) sectors with opportunities to consolidate and rationalise total supply & distribution chain across all modes of transport.
• Central to all road, rail and shipping operations in Victoria and is ideally situated to exploit future advances in transport modes an increasing freight catchment area nationally.