Port Salford

Port Salford is a unique development, a distribution park served by rail, road and short sea shipping. It will be assembled on one site, and will double the capacity of existing multi-modal terminals in Greater Manchester. The site is located at Barton alongside the Manchester Ship Canal and will offer container ship berths, the highest capacity intermodal rail terminal in Britain and large rail linked buildings to cater for the regional distribution of rail borne domestic and international cargo.

Port Salford will have the capacity to double the number of container trains that currently serve the two terminals on Trafford Park and to handle two container ships simultaneously and also to handle over 200,000 pallets of cargo at any one time in the rail linked distribution buildings. The transfer of the Trafford Park trains from their existing route through Piccadilly station to a route from the south via Newton-Le-Willows will remove most of the freight trains currently passing along the Oxford Road – Piccadilly corridor, therefore allowing more passenger trains to operate. Port Salford will be connected into the regional motorway network via the A57 to the M60, the M62 and the M6. It will be built on a site which has been used to tip waste and for chemical manufacturing in the past. It will be the only inland water served distribution park in the UK.

Port Salford site lies on the north bank of the Manchester Ship Canal immediately west of the M60 Manchester orbital motorway and of Barton locks. The disused basin in Davyhulme on the south bank provides a turning facility for ships so that only two locks will separate Manchester’s new container port facility from the open sea at Eastham and Latchford.

The site will be connected to the ‘Chat Moss’ railway line by a short branch line running over the A57 and to the east of City Airport Manchester, formerly known as Barton Aerodrome, linked to the mainline by chords to both the east and west. The railway line offers direct links to Liverpool, the West Coast Main Line at Newton-Le-Willows, Manchester, and via the Trans-Pennine route to Leeds, the East Coast Main Line and the Humber ports. It already offers an adequate loading gauge for modern sized containers on ‘megafret’ wagons between Liverpool and the Pennines.
Road access to the site will be via the A57, and a new road planned within the wider project across the Ship Canal upstream of Barton Locks and linking to Junction 10 of the M60 and thus relieving pressure on the Barton Bridge. The A57 already links the site to Junction 11 of the M60. Westwards, the completion of the Irlam and Cadishead by-pass provides a route to Junction 21 of the M6.

On the site itself, there will be a 7-track rail reception yard capable of receiving the longest trains planned for the UK (775 metres), which in turn, will serve a 17 hectare integrated rail and port terminal. This terminal is expected to be able to handle up to 300,000 containers each year and from rail and ship.

Some 150,000 square metres of distribution buildings will be located immediately next to the terminal, each also with its own railway siding for conventional wagons. These buildings will therefore be able to receive goods by rail or sea without intermediate road delivery, reducing environmental impact and cutting costs. That cost advantage will give a competitive advantage to companies locating at Port Salford, being able to receive or despatch goods at a minimum cost from and to anywhere in the world.