We started with the nature of the cargo. A coil of cold-rolled steel weighs anywhere from eight to twenty-five tonnes, and the main risk to it is not loss or theft but mechanical damage: a creased edge, a broken band, compromised packaging. Every crane lift is both time and another chance of exactly that claim. So we framed the task differently from the usual one: not to find a cheaper leg, but to reduce the number of times anything touches the cargo.
The answer was a bogie exchange. At the border the wagon is raised on jacks and its running gear is swapped from European 1,435 mm gauge onto 1,520 mm broad gauge, while the cargo stays secured on the same wagon. This is a fundamentally different operation from the familiar crane transshipment: the steel itself never moves. The swap takes hours rather than a day and removes the damage risk at the gauge junction entirely. For containers, crane transshipment is perfectly normal, but for coil and sheet the difference shows up directly in the claims register.
We ran the route from the port of Constanța by rail across Romania to the Halmeu–Dyakovo crossing and on to the destination station in Transcarpathia, from where the steel moved out across the Ukrainian Railways network. For sheet steel we used long flat wagons with timber decks, calculated the securing against the loading regulations and agreed the lashing plan in advance. It is also worth noting that with the opening in 2025 of the European-gauge Chop–Uzhhorod section, the western region gained a further option of bringing 1,435 mm gauge traffic directly onto Ukrainian territory, and for part of the traffic we consider precisely that.
The shipments moved under a CIM/SMGS consignment note, which exists for routes between European and broad gauge, together with the invoice, the mill test certificate and evidence of origin, and we filed the declaration ahead of arrival so the wagons would not sit at the station. The client ended up with what the road scheme could not give: one dispatch instead of dozens of trips, substantially fewer claims at handover, and an alternative import channel that is not tied to the Danube ports.