Iran’s 1st Dry Port Inaugurated

Iran’s first dry port was inaugurated in Eslamshahr County of Tehran Province on Monday in the presence of Minister of Roads and Urban Development, Mehrdad Bazrpash.
“Aprin” is touted as inland import/export hub for transshipment in the center of Iran, Mehr News Agency reported.
The inaugural ceremony saw the arrival of a freight train that departed from the port city of Bandar Abbas, located in southern coast of Iran, on the Persian Gulf, for Tehran three days before, according to Miad Salehi, the head of The Islamic Republic of Iran Railways.
This is the first phase of the project spread across an area of about 55 hectares.
Notably, the dry port is located about 20 km away from Tehran at the center of the East-West and North-South international rail corridors.
The Islamic Republic of Iran Railways has accelerated the construction of Aprin since last year for developing rail transport and creating logistics centers.
The first phase saw the construction of Iran's largest inland container hub with 10 trillion rials ($20 million) of investment by the private sector. It includes infrastructures, such as the customs and railroad administration buildings, as well as unloading and loading area. 
Reducing the clearance time for imported goods, fuel consumption, time of storing goods in customs offices, carrying out formalities for export goods in the vicinity of the capital, creating jobs and boosting production are among the advantages of this strategic plan.
Roads and Urban Development Minister Mehrdad Bazrpash also announced plans to build two more dry ports in Isfahan and South Khorasan provinces. 
A dry port (sometimes referred to as an inland port) is an intermodal terminal directly connected by road or rail to a seaport, operating as a center for the transshipment of sea cargo to inland destinations.
In addition to their role in cargo transshipment, dry ports may also include facilities for storage of goods, maintenance of road or rail cargo carriers and customs clearance services. The location of these facilities at a dry port improves competition for storage and customs facilities at the seaport itself.
A dry inland port can speed up the flow of cargo between ships and major land transportation networks, creating a more central distribution point. Inland ports can improve the movement of imports and exports, moving the time-consuming sorting and processing of containers inland, away from congested seaports.
The term “inland port” is used in a narrow sense in the field of transportation systems to mean a specialized facility for intermodal containers (standardized shipping container) in international transport. Rather than goods being loaded and unloaded in such ports, shipping containers can be transferred between ship and road vehicle, or ship and train. The container may be transferred again between road and rail elsewhere and the goods are only loaded or unloaded at their point of origin or final destination.
Shipping containers allow some functions traditionally carried out at a seaport to be moved elsewhere. Examples are the functions of receiving, processing, inspecting, sorting and consolidating containers through customs going to the same overseas port. Container transfer at the seaport can be sped up and container handling space can be reduced by transferring functions to an inland site away from the port and coast.
Distribution can also be made more efficient by setting up a link between the inland site and seaport as a high-capacity rail link with a lower unit cost than sending containers individually by road. The containers are still collected from their origins or distributed to their ultimate destinations by road, with the transfer happening at the inland site.
An inland port is just such an inland site linked to a seaport. This kind of port does not require a waterway. Key features of an inland port are the transfer of containers between different modes of transportation (intermodal transfer) and the processing of international trade. This differentiates an inland port from a container depot or transport hub.
Inland port may also be used for a similar model of a site linked to an airport or land border crossing, rather than a seaport.
The definition of inland port in transportation and logistics industries is a physical site located away from traditional land, air and coastal borders with the vision of facilitating and processing international trade through strategic investment in multimodal transportation assets and by promoting value-added services as goods move through the supply chain.
Inland ports may also be referred to as dry ports or intermodal hubs.