Rail on Track: Port2Rail Returns to Portugal and SURCO Navarra Brings Intermodality to the Region
We’ve been busy on the rails. This spring, two new programmes have taken our approach to hands-on training directly into the field — connecting learning with real infrastructure, real operations, and real logistics networks.
The Port2Rail 2026 cohort. Three days, six logistics nodes, and a train full of people who understand that the best way to learn intermodality is to live it.
Port2Rail is back — fourteen years on
Port2Rail, our practical course on maritime-rail intermodality, returned to Portugal with a new edition that took participants through Lisbon, Setúbal, Sines, Aveiro, Leixões and Entroncamento. Fourteen years after its first edition, the concept remains the same: the train journey itself becomes the classroom.
From the vault: participants of the very first Port2Rail edition, 2011. Fourteen years later, the train is still running
Over three days, transport, logistics and international trade professionals combined technical sessions, operational visits and hands-on exercises with the Port Virtual Lab, exploring Portugal’s key logistics nodes and analysing the integration of ports, rail terminals and intermodal corridors in real time.
The programme was developed together with APAT – Associação dos Transitários de Portugal, with the participation of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Infraestruturas de Portugal, CP – Comboios de Portugal, MEDWAY, and the port authorities of Lisbon, Setúbal, Sines, Aveiro and Leixões.
As our director Eduard Rodés put it: “Running this course on rails again, fourteen years after its first edition, meant recovering a way of learning that is directly connected to the operational reality of rail and intermodal transport. These initiatives are only possible thanks to the collaboration between public institutions, rail operators, port authorities, companies and training organisations who believe in education built from real experience.”
SURCO Navarra: rail in regional context
Alongside Port2Rail, we recently delivered the SURCO Navarra programme, developed in collaboration with the Government of Navarra — which funded it entirely — and with the support of CEN and AER. The programme brought together shippers, carriers, logistics operators and vocational training teachers in Pamplona and Tudela to explore the role of rail within regional and international logistics chains.
Participants visited the Traffic Control Centre in Zaragoza, the Zaragoza Maritime Terminal and the intermodal terminal in Noáin — translating real infrastructure into shared learning.
Both programmes reflect what we do best: training that doesn’t happen in a classroom alone, but inside the logistics networks we’re all working to improve.
