Maersk, MSC to commence service to Prince Rupert

The 2M Alliance carriers will join the members of the CKYHE Alliance in offering service through the intermodal gateway in Northern British Columbia.    Maersk Line and Mediterranean Shipping Co. will begin weekly service to the port of Prince Rupert in British Columbia later in September as part of a revised rotation the ocean carriers’ joint 2M Alliance service Maersk calls “TP8” and MSC calls its “New Orient” string.
   Prince Rupert said of the announcement, “The addition of this containerized cargo service expands the reach of Asia-North American trade through the Port of Prince Rupert to new markets and shippers, supporting further growth and expansion of the West Coast’s leading edge gateway.”
   Until now, Prince Rupert’s Fairview Container Terminal has been served primarily by ships COSCO, Hanjin and their CKYHE alliance partners Yang Ming, “K” Line, and Evergreen as well as other carriers share space on those vessels, including China Shipping and Wan Hai.
   According to ocean carrier schedule and capacity database BlueWater Reporting, three direct liner services call at Prince Rupert: the CPNW, which is operated with six COSCO vessels with an average capacity of 5,391 TEUs; the PNH/HPNW, operated with six Hanjin vessels with an average capacity of 5,628 TEUs; and the CEN/CALCO-Q, operated with five COSCO vessels and one from CSCL with an average capacity of 8,914 TEUs. Maersk also called Prince Rupert last Thursday with the ship Thomas Mann, in what the port said is a “limited-time extension of its TP Alaska eastbound service” that calls Dutch Harbor, Alaska.
   In addition to the Prince Rupert call, the revised TP8/New Orient service will also feature a call in Shanghai.
   The full rotation will be Tanjung Pelepas, Qingdao, Shanghai, Busan, Prince Rupert, Long Beach, Vostochny, Shanghai, Ningbo, Kaohsiung, Chiwan, Hong Kong, Yantian, Singapore, Tanjung Pelepas.
   Early schedules show the two companies will operate the loop using ships with capacity ranging from 8,400 TEUs to 9,411 TEUs.
   Nearly all cargo moving through Prince Rupert is moved by rail to the U.S. Midwest or Central Canada via Canadian National Railway’s network.
   Fairview Container Terminal has a current capacity of 850,000 TEUs annually, and a recently-announced second phase of expansion will bring capacity to 1.35 million TEUs. The ongoing expansion project is expected to be finished by mid-2017. The port handled 618,167 TEUs in 2014, a 15 percent increase over 2013.
   In another development, the Singapore-based carrier AAL has included calls to Prince Rupert’s Ridley Island terminal several times since late spring as part of its transpacific service. Offering monthly sailings, the service calls at a number of base ports in China, Korea, the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada, while Japan ports are offered on an inducement basis.
   AAL employs multipupose, heavy lift vessels with 31,000 dwt capacity and cranes with combined lifting capacity of 700 metric tons. Most of the AAL cargo discharged in Prince Rupert is equipment headed to Northeast British Columbia and Alberta for use in the oil and gas industry.