Goods station

Under a freight station (abbreviations: in Germany Gbf, Switzerland GB; designation in Austria: freight station, abbreviated Fbf ) is understood in the broadest sense, a railway facility or part thereof, on which will take place no passenger, but only goods in any form from the street or loaded from ship to rail or vice versa and / or wagons are handed over to local sidings.

If the goods are not sent or received, but only transferred to the transport between rail and other means of transport such as ship or truck, it is called a transshipment station ( Ubf ). These arise in the context of combined transport often as a container terminal. Such a trade station is also called container station.

Plant

Freight stations can

• Immediately adjacent to a passenger station (either seen from the reception building behind the platforms or passenger and freight station directly behind the other ),
• Separated from the passenger station along one of these routes or leaving
• Be created as stand-alone systems without connection with a passenger station.

In the single wagonload traffic destined for the individual freight stations freight cars are mostly delivered by separate marshalling yards and picked up again. Some cases there are also combined shunting and freight stations.

Equipment

For its purpose the goods station is usually equipped with a larger number of sidings and loading tracks. Are located at the loading tracks, either fixed mount or for a short term period (eg wheel loaders for the distribution of sugar beet) established loading systems (cranes, conveyors, etc.).

If it is in to be loaded goods primarily to container, these freight stations are also known as container terminals (CT ) refers, on which again provide special cranes and stacking vehicles for loading the container from the truck or boat to the car or back.

If only a small part of the station or stations range is used for loading goods, so this is also called the loading point and has its own driveway with signs. Stands for the loading of goods usually give no facility available, the shipment must be organized by the individual company itself ( conveyors, truck cranes, etc.).

Such loading points are or were mostly found on branch lines, narrow gauge railways and smaller stations.

Have Medium and larger freight yards or mostly had also sidings for distributing the arrivals trains on the various local charge and sidings as well as a simultaneous function as a smaller hub stations, which were also partially equipped in some mainly European countries with a hump.

Pictures

Container gantry crane train station Dresden, 1972

Structural change

Due to the progressive shift of freight were on the road and many freight stations and, consequently, marshalling yards will continue to shut down and then often canceled so that the resumption of rail freight set in the same place is no longer possible. In other combined freight and railway stations with hump latter was shut down at the object of the node function of the station with maintaining the local freight depot function. Furthermore, the general cargo traffic was in most countries shifted completely to the street, which led to the closure of the Güterhallen result, and wagonload most public quays and loading ramps freight stations for small customers were abandoned, so most of all today operated freight stations only be used as container stations and / or transfer stations to sidings.