Containers move straight from train to ship, and from ship to train without delay. Across the vast waters of the Beibu Gulf, multiple large container vessels arrive in succession, with gantry cranes resembling steel giants precisely lifting containers while intelligent guided vehicles (IGVs) shuttle back and forth. Inside the automated terminal's U-shaped storage yard, rail-mounted gantries move along smart-planned routes, and container trucks drive directly into their designated berths, completing loading and unloading without any intermediate transfer steps.
This is the Qinzhou Automated Container Terminal at Beibu Gulf Port, the first fully automated terminal in China to achieve seamless rail-sea intermodal connectivity. "In the past, rail-sea intermodal transport required multiple rounds of reloading. Now containers move directly from truck to ship or from ship to truck, achieving a truly seamless connection," said Yang Feng, deputy manager of operations at the Qinzhou Automated Container Terminal, pointing toward the Qinzhou Railway Container Center Station located directly behind the terminal and closely linked to it.
As the core gateway hub of the New Western Land-Sea Corridor, the Qinzhou Automated Container Terminal has taken the "Five-in-One Integration" reforms as its central strategy, covering operational zones, customs supervision, business marketing, information systems, and production organization. This distinctive approach has successfully tackled the bottlenecks in multimodal transport, reducing rail-sea intermodal transfer time to no more than 1.7 hours per vehicle trip and improving road-to-sea transfer efficiency to 12.5 minutes per vehicle trip, significantly enhancing hub connection performance.
The efficiency gains stem from breakthroughs in both physical space and digital barriers. The Qinzhou Automated Container Terminal pioneered the U-shaped layout globally, which substantially reduces construction and maintenance costs compared to terminals using conventional end-loading configurations. Terminal staff further explained: "The terminal has a depth of 1,000 meters. Under a traditional vertical layout, external vehicles could only queue at the end of the storage yard, and automated rail-mounted gantries had to constantly travel back and forth, consuming high energy with low efficiency." The U-shaped lane layout offers multiple loading points and flexible container retrieval. In 2025, the average operating time for external container trucks at the terminal has remained within 15 minutes.
To address physical barriers, the terminal promoted integrated transformation of operational zones with customs supervision, removing fencing to shift transfers from "outside to inside," eliminating one gate entry, and shortening single-transfer travel distance by nearly one kilometer. Meanwhile, the Qinzhou port area has established a sea-rail collection and distribution information platform, achieving real-time data exchange between port and railway operating systems for the first time in China, with core operational data synchronized at minute-level intervals. Through research breakthroughs in multi-source heterogeneous information fusion technology, heterogeneous data processing now takes no more than 0.6 seconds, and cross-domain path planning responses occur within 1 second, providing real-time support for coordinated scheduling of vehicles, vessels, and containers.
To resolve the challenges posed by three heterogeneous operational environments—automated terminal, manual terminal, and railway center station—spanning different operating entities, automation levels, and transport modes, the technical team innovatively built a smart port hybrid traffic model. By integrating multimodal sensing and deep learning technologies, they developed composite navigation technology for intelligent guided vehicles in cross-domain transport, enabling unmanned transport equipment to operate seamlessly across different scenarios with intelligent cluster control. Currently, the positioning success rate between composite-navigation IGVs and traditional rubber-tired gantries exceeds 95%, with parking accuracy around 5 centimeters and active obstacle avoidance success rates above 99.9%. Once fully operational, cross-domain transfer efficiency is expected to improve by over 10%.
From removing fencing and opening data channels to advancing technology and promoting integration, intermodal efficiency continues to strengthen. With the opening of the Pinglu Canal approaching, the expansion and renovation project for berths 7 through 10 at the Dalanping South Operation Area in Qinzhou's Dalianping Port District is progressing at full speed. The terminal will simultaneously construct five 5,000-ton-class automated container berths for river-sea intermodal transport, allowing thousand-ton-class cargo vessels arriving via the Pinglu Canal to achieve rapid "ship-to-ship" transfers with the ten-thousand-ton-class ocean-going vessels docked nearby.