The Vice-President of the European Investment Bank, Prof. Ewald Nowotny, and Dr. Helmut Falschlehner, Business Director of the Railway Infrastructure Financing Co. Ltd. - "SCHIG", signed today in Vienna a EUR 40 million loan for Freight Terminal and Logistic Centre in Graz, Styria, Austria.
The purpose of the project is to encourage the transfer of freight distribution from road to rail and close the nearby freight centres located in built up areas. The project will contribute to an improvement in the environment by helping to reduce the number of heavy goods vehicles on the roads. It will reduce atmospheric pollution, fumes, and noise and substantially increase road safety in the region of Styria that has a high concentration of iron and steel, paper, vehicles and parts as well as machinery industries. The closing down of the container terminals in built up areas will benefit the adjacent inhabitants.
This project is one of first projects in Austria to be financed by SCHIG under a Private Public Partnership structure, whereby the Austrian Federal Government contributions directly fund 47% of the Project and the private operator of the Cargo Center Graz terminal will generate the remaining 53% through lease payments.
The project covers development of container handling facilities, an itemised freight handling area, including warehouses, and a roll-on roll-off rail/road facility with a facility to handle 100,000 containers per year. The terminal includes over 21 km of railway track for container/freight trains. The EIB will finance the basic infrastructure, that is all works up to and including ground level construction, i.e. roads, railway track, storage areas etc but excluding warehouses, offices and equipment.
During today's signature of the contract EIB Vice-President Prof. Ewald Nowotny commented on the project saying: "the project will promote environmentally friendly transport in alignment with EU transport policy objectives. It will lead to an improvement of rail freight services running through Austria where increased road freight traffic has created special environmental and safety concerns. In addition, co-financing with Private Public Partnership will decrease financial needs from tense public budgets".
This new loan brings EIB financing in Austria to more than EUR 3.5 billion during the recent past five years. Construction of a road/rail logistics centre for itemised freight, improvement of the public transport network both in Linz, Upper Austria, and modernisation of the fleets on the Austrian Airlines as well as of the Tyrolean Airlines represented the major projects financed in the area of transport in Austria in the recent time.