Rail Cargo Hungaria sends off 4,000th Suzuki block train

In a ceremony today, Executive General Manager of Magyar Suzuki Corporation Róbert Krisztián, also a member of MSC’s board of directors and CEO of Rail Cargo Hungaria Ltd. and chairman of its board of directors Imre Kovács sent off the 4,000th block train carrying Suzuki cars manufactured in Esztergom for exports. Launched on the 25th anniversary of the departure of the first Suzuki train, the 20 special wagons now carry 200 Suzuki vehicles to Zeebrugge, Belgium, and from there, the cars will continue their journey to several countries across the globe.

“Planned at 50,000 items a year initially, Magyar Suzuki Corporation has multiplied its production capacity,“ Róbert Krisztián said at the anniversary event. “By now, the cars manufactured by Magyar Suzuki run on the roads of 128 countries. For all these vehicles to reach their destinations, Rail Cargo’s accurate and reliable services have been indispensable since the very beginning,” Róbert continued.

Imre Kovács declared that the market-leading company is proud to have been MSC’s permanent rail cargo services provider for 25 years. “Thanks to its 25-year history of partnership with Magyar Suzuki, Rail Cargo Hungaria has become Hungary’s market-leading railway car transport specialist,” he declared. “We will continue to do our best to meet Suzuki’s high quality requirements as a provider of rail cargo services as well as of railway logistics services in the future, too”.

With the growth of Suzuki’s production, in the past ten years, Rail Cargo Hungaria Ltd. has been launching block trains from Esztergom almost on a daily basis. To meet a high global demand for the cars manufactured here, in the first six months of 2016 alone, as many as 2,000 railway wagons left the factory, each carrying at least 8 to 10 cars. The growth is shown by the fact that in the period of a year, Suzuki’s sales of own-production cars grew from 150,578 items in 2014 to 181,115. This 20% increase of sales inevitably required a corresponding growth of cargo services.

Rail Cargo’s block trains usually carry 180–200 Suzukis and travel 1,500 km on average. Departing from Esztergom, their destinations are usually major European ports: Zeebrugge in Belgium, Rotterdam in the Netherlands or Lübeck in Germany. There the cars are unloaded from the trains, and most of them continue their journey as boat cargo to Scandinavia, Australia, South-America, Taiwan and Japan. A large number of Suzukis manufactured in Hungary reach their customers on a shorter journey by rail to almost every country in Europe.

In the past decade, Rail Cargo Hungaria’s trains loaded with Suzuki cars ran a total distance of 2.6 million train kilometers; and over the 25 years of partnership, Rail Cargo’s trains carrying Suzukis ran a total of almost 5 million kilometers. Lined up, the wagons loaded with Suzukis from Esztergom over the past 25 years would make up a 4500-km long train.