European Rail Shuttle BV was founded in 1994 at the beginning of the liberalisation of the rail freight market as a joint venture between the companies Maersk, Sealand Service, P&O Containers, Nedlloyd and NS Cargo. The offer focused on container transport between Rotterdam and destinations along the Rhine in Germany and the Melzo terminal in Italy.
In its first years of operation, European Rail Shuttle was "only" an intermodal operator. The added value that the company offered its shareholders at that time was based on the organisation of intermodal shuttle solutions through the bundling of volumes of its shareholders, as well as the purchase of traction services from a few suppliers.
In 2002, European Rail Shuttle changed its name to ERS Railways BV and positioned itself as an independent operator with rail licences in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. In the same year, ERS BV became the main shareholder of the rail transport company boxXpress GmbH, based in Hamburg. In this constellation, as a rail transport company with its own licence, ERS Railways BV served terminals in Italy, Poland (Poznan) and for a short time the Czech Republic (Melnik) from the seaport of Rotterdam until 2017. As the main shareholder of boxXpress with a 47% stake, the network was built up in parallel with transports from Bremerhaven and Hamburg to the German hinterland.
In 2013, Freightliner UK acquired the shares in ERS Railways BV, which had been held solely by Maersk Line in the meantime.
In 2015, the American listed company Genesee & Wyoming Inc. took over Freightliner UK and thus also became the owner of ERS Railways BV.
In 2017, Genesee & Wyoming ended the transports to Italy and Poland carried out independently by ERS and sold its shares to Hupac Ltd in summer 2018. By merging with Hupac Maritime Logistics GmbH, Duisburg, today's ERS Railways GmbH in Hamburg was created.
ERS today offers maritime intermodal transports from the German and Dutch seaports to the economic centres of the German hinterland as well as Switzerland and Austria via boxXpress as a "production company". Terminal-to-terminal and terminal-to-door solutions are used. Further train connections for maritime and continental loading units of combined transport are produced via Freightliner GmbH and European Gateway Services to round off the intermodal portfolio of ERS Railways GmbH.
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