A day and a half of downtime sounds manageable on paper. In practice, once the line reopens it takes several more days to clear the backlog: trains that were already held go first, and new departures wait for a free slot in the timetable. By our estimate the containers booked on the next departure would leave Rijeka several days late at best. We proposed taking them by road straight from the port. That costs more, with one truck per container and close to nine hundred kilometres to the border. The client agreed, because waiting would have cost them more.
From then on it was a question of speed. We pulled the containers from the rail booking and arranged their release with the terminal. The trucks came from Croatian hauliers with container chassis: local companies could have vehicles in place within a day, while sending tractor units from Ukraine would have lost another two or three. The goods came from a third country and moved under transit, so we re-issued the transit documents for road transport. Then the trucks set off across Hungary towards the border.
It was not smooth. The terminal released the containers in batches, so the trucks left the port one by one rather than as a convoy. The queue at the Hungarian–Ukrainian crossing did not care about our schedule either. The client got updates in pieces, and it was a tense week for everyone, us included. In the end the containers reached customs in Ukraine sooner than rail could have delivered them once traffic resumed.
Our takeaway is simple. Every rail route needs a road fallback worked out in advance: hauliers, rates, documents. Then the switch to trucks takes hours, with no last-minute hunt for transport.