The Rhine Crisis Is Spilling Onto the Road
Market Monday - Week 34 - Record-low Rhine water levels at Kaub are testing German industry and Europe’s limited reserve of transport capacity
The Rhine warning signs we tracked earlier have become a full logistics crisis. On Friday, 14 August, the Kaub gauge on the Rhine stood at a new record low of 6 cm. The previous low before this summer was 25 cm, set in October 2018. The gauge is not the river’s actual depth and does not trigger an official closure, but as the permitted draft falls, barges must shed cargo or stop. The few still operating can take only a fraction of normal payload (reports put load factors at 10-20%); most of the others are idle or operating only within isolated sections.
Relief is unlikely this month. The latest Rhine water level forecast from Germany’s Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG) is almost certain that Kaub will remain below its 77 cm Equivalent Water Level through 22 August, and 97% likely on 27 August. Its six-week Kaub water level forecast has the median weekly mean rising from 26 cm to 43 cm, then to roughly 100 cm by late September. But the chance of Rhine low water levels persisting through late September remains high. The likely path for the next few weeks is a partial recovery from historic lows, not normalization.
The Rhine is a super-highway for cargo: hundreds of millions of tonnes of freight move along it each year, much of its bulk cargo for which alternative modes are scarce and expensive. Industry built around bulk deliveries operates on long timescales and cannot readily substitute either the cargo or the mode of transport.
More Sundays, but not more trucks
Road transport is the quickest fallback but cannot match the Rhine’s scale. Widespread switching of chemicals, fuel or coal deliveries would require special bulk trailers, trained staff and compliant facilities that are barely available on the market The slightly relieved summer capacity of curtain-siders or box trucks, visible in our Market Insights data, would not help to move most of the cargo from inland waterways.
The market effect on European road freight is therefore uneven. It is emerging first around Rhine terminals and the ARA ports, on routes into western and southern Germany, eastern France and Switzerland, and is impacting almost exclusively the bulk segment - tankers, silos and tippers.
To counter the crisis, Germany has relaxed Sunday and public-holiday driving bans, often including the summer Saturday ban, but German federal states manage these changes individually. Most cover only journeys connected to low-water replacement traffic and expire on 31 August. Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland run to 30 September. Only Thuringia has opened Sundays to all trucks, while Saxony-Anhalt still requires individual permits.
The effect on broader market capacity will be small, as carriers cannot use the exemptions at will. To operate on Sundays outside Thuringia, they should carry evidence linking the load to disrupted inland shipping, such as a canceled barge booking, shipper declaration or transport order. In essence, drivers need paperwork showing a plausible link between inland shipping problems and his journey. Driving time and rest rules would still apply. Nor does a Sunday exemption ensure that terminals and factories can receive cargo.
Help from rail is coming
Rail is providing more help than the headlines suggest. Reports say that DB Cargo intends to provide hundreds of additional wagons and that intermodal providers are mobilising extra emergency container train capacity. But the railway has its own bottleneck: the important right-bank Rhine line between Troisdorf and Wiesbaden is fully closed for reconstruction until 12 December, congesting rail freight onto the left bank and longer diversionary routes. DB InfraGO has appointed a low-water coordinator, is offering extra paths where available and plans to adjust other non-critical engineering works. Combined-transport terminals may also handle bulk goods outside conventional intermodal operations until 30 September. Rail can absorb some selected flows, particularly containers, but the closed corridor and capacity limits prevent any large-scale shift and bulk-cargo relief.
Road-rate pressure is likely to remain local and equipment-specific, not significantly affecting the broader rate and capacity indices in Germany or at the European level.
Given the current BfG expectations, Rhine river water levels may recover from today’s extreme lows during September, but not fully. Europe’s road and rail markets will attempt to bridge some of the differences, with little spare capacity and even less room for error.
Oleksandr Kulish
Senior Consultant
Trimble Transportation (Transporeon)
Data: Kaub gauge readings via PEGELONLINE/WSV; 14-day and 6-week forecasts by the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG), CC BY 4.0; figures summarized by the author.