Inland Ports: is the Irish business sector prepared to invest in building Inland Ports?

[Mayner]

This post was triggered by IEs recent announcement that it has signed an agreement to order 400 wagons over the next 10 years and a recent announcement that a NZ Developer Construction company is building an Inland Port in the South Island. https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360688905/explained-why-company-planning-3-billion-inland-port-development-otago

Which brings up the question of whether Irish businesses are prepared to build Inland Ports or 'a network of intermodal terminals offering logistic services nationally" as IEs Rail-Freight 2040 Strategy long widely describes them https://www.irishrail.ie/Admin/getmedia/685e9919-f012-4018-879b-06618bb536af/IE_Rail-Freight-2040-Strategy_Public_Final_20210715.pdf

Although there were private sectors proposals for a rail linked Inland Ports at Clondalkin (National Distribution Centre and near Portlaoise during the late 1990s and even e Dublin Port proposal to build an Inland Port for container storage with its own fleet of wagons none of these proposals for a rail linked Inland Port materialised. Dublin Port deciding instead to serve "Dublin Inland Port" by road through the Port Tunnel and motorway network.

Daventry International Freight terminal originally operated by Tibbett and Britten was an early example of a railfreight served Inland Port in England, locally the Port of Tauranga developed an Inland Port in Auckland (our largest city) about 30 years ago (think Waterford Port or Foynes establishing an Inland Port in Dublin) with rail-freight terminals shifting from railway owned land to private sector owned terminals usually operated by Logistics companies. Hamilton where I live a city with a population of approx 100k opened its 1st Inland Port about 25 years ago to serve Fonterra (NZ largest dairy sector operator) and as the cities railfreight terminal, more recently Kiwirail provided a private siding off the main line to serve a new Mainfreight Transport Depot on the outskirts of the City. Mainfreight is served by trip working to and from the local marshalling years. The latest development is the Ruakura Superhub https://www.ruakura.co.nz/ on the western side of the city with rail access close to a major road/motorway junction. Ruakura was mainly agricultural (ag research) until development work commenced about 10 years ago.

Due to their large scale (amount of space) and simple rail layout contemporary Inland Port is not really feasible of interesting from a modelling perspective unless you model in Z or have a hell of a lot of space,

Largely funded by the private sector sometimes with minor state sector involvement it will be interesting to see if similar rail served development take off in Ireland.