After Antwerp, Bremen’s ports are the second most important transshipment hub in Europe for forestry products, steel products and machinery. The port in Neustadt is home to Europe’s largest terminal for breakbulk and heavy-lift cargo, which offers more than a million square metres of warehouse space and outdoor storage. The Breakbulk Europe trade fair, which took place in Bremen in May 2018 for the first time and will take place here in May 2019 for the second time, attracted almost 10,000 visitors. In short, Bremen is well positioned and prepared for the future when it comes to breakbulk.
The easiest way to describe breakbulk is ‘anything that doesn’t fit in a container’. The terminals in Neustadt port have evolved into specialists in the conventional handling of breakbulk. It arrives in Bremen on regular liner services and is distributed from there to customers throughout Germany. Neustadt port’s services mainly include the handling of project cargo, forestry products, and iron and steel products, as well as the transshipment by floating crane of containers and heavy goods with unit weights of up to 650 tonnes. Increasingly, large components for onshore wind farms are also transshipped via the port, and natural gas liquefaction plants, which arrive in large individual parts in Neustadt port where they are assembled into finished plants, are loaded onto large ships or pontoons for onward transport.
Around 550 seagoing vessels and barges are processed annually in Neustadt port. A quay length of around 2,400 metres and water depth of up to 11 metres offer optimal conditions for the transshipment of around 1.3 million tonnes per year. The 18 kilometre long rail network within the port ensures that even a larger number of wagons and locomotives can be unloaded directly from the track to the vessels.
