BARCELONA: November 21, 2018. Hutchison Ports Barcelona Europe South Terminal (BEST), part of Hutchison Ports, has begun a weekly container rail service between Barcelona and Lyon.

The new link adds to similar operations connecting the Catalan port with Zaragoza, Madrid, Pamplona, Miranda de Ebro, Tarragona and Burgos.

BEST chief executive Guillermo Belcastro said the new service is a significant extension of the company’s multimodal offering, making it a competitive alternative for the logistics market “of both the peninsula and the rest of Southern Europe”. The average non-stop transit time is around six hours.

The terminal’s rail traffic has doubled to 20 percent of full local traffic between 2010 and 2018 with almost a 100 trains a week serving points throughout the Iberlan Peninsular with eight mixed gauge tracks.

For the first nine months of 2018, the Port of Barcelona reported a 10.5 percent year-on-year rise in rail traffic with a total of 199,000 TEUs arriving and departing. Overall container traffic rose 13.5 percent to over 2.5 million TEUs.