s the train pulls into the UK’s busiest railway station, security and other managers from WWL, Hitachi and local rail authorities are on board, keeping an eye as it stops in the yard to change engineers. On hand are also

British Transport Police officers, alert not just because this is the end of a 21,000-kilometre journey, but because this is the first delivery of a multi-year project that will bring 29 of what will be the UK’s fastest six-car trains from Japan.

Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics is entrusted with every step in the delivery of the trains from the factory door in Yamaguchi, Japan, to their working home in Ashford, UK.

to go perfectly. The logistics chal-lenge was a big one. The trains were built by Hitachi Ltd. in its Kasado Factory in Kudamatsu, Yamaguchi. Once completed, responsibility for the first six-car train was

handed over to WWL—and this didn’t simply mean carrying them from one port to another. It literally meant everything involved in carrying the train cars from the inland factory to the port of Kobe, loading them on WWL’s RoRo vessel M/VTarago for its regular departure to the port of Southamp-ton, England, and, once there, getting them across the UK to their final destination in Ashford. From there, they will work for the London and Southeastern Railways.

, but it also went smoothly because it was something we’ve done many times before,” says Hi-royuki Matsuda, WWL’s General Manager, NCC Japan Com-mercial .“We had already delivered some 2,000 railcars for another Japanese maker since 1992, from Japan to New York, Los Angeles and Savannah in the US. This American exper-ience is now being transferred to the European market.”

What makes this new job particularly interesting, is the

number of firsts that it represents. “It’s the first time that Hitachi, or any Japanese

maker, has been able to sell to a European market,” Matsuda says. “These aren’t just light rail trains, either, but Hitachi class 395 high-speed trains mod-elled on the Shinkansen bullet trains that will travel a top speed of 225 kilometres per hour, making them the fastest in the UK.”

The trains, scheduled to be in service in 2009, will slash travel from London to Ashford by less than half, and will be part of the Javelin shuttle service for the 2012 London Olympic Games.

that we have handled the lo-gistics for train transport literally from door to door,” Matsuda says. “Previously it was the more traditional port-to-port service.”

And, with 168 cars of the total 174 (or 29 train form-ations) remaining to be delivered in the contract with Hitachi, everyone wanted to do it right the first time.

“The main reason we were able to do it was team-work,” he says. “It’s no exaggeration to say that we couldn’t have done it without the strong support of WWL in the UK.”

For the first loading, Peter Lavelle from WWL UK joined in a week of work in Japan, while his coun-terpart Michiya Seki from Tokyo in turn travelled to Britain to follow through on the process of offloading and delivery—and to provide global support for their international customer.

for getting this big first job with Hitachi done right, Matsuda says: there’s plenty of opportunity ahead.

“Japan’s a very mature market for Japanese manu-facturers, so we have to really look ahead to see other opportunities out of Japan. Hitachi has now been able to penetrate the UK market, and they see an aging in-frastructure in the rails there that will need replacing.”

Matsuda adds that he now sees other European mar-kets as potential customers for Japanese train manu-facturers—and for WWL in getting the trains there.

“We needed to find a company able to deliver on our challenge to get the trains from the Japanese factory to Ashford, UK within our time schedule. Luckily, we contacted WWL and they delivered as planned. I was at the Southamp-ton terminal when the train arrived and WWL and Hitachi were very busy putting it together to make it ready for rail-travel to the Ashford depot.”

“We chose WWL because they were able to

offer us a one-stop shop, from the factory in Kasado directly to the Ashford depot in Kent, in south England. They gave us what we required, at the right time, and we are very pleased.”

“The way the train was transported from Japan to the new depot in Ashford is a very challenging experience because it involved a huge amount of logistics work. For example, it is worth noting that in collaboration with WWL we had to design rubber tyre bogies for the load-ing on and off the ship. We worked very closely with Mark Bookham from WWL to make sure that everything happened as planned – and it has been done very successfully, so a big thank you to WWL.”