ACT lost its last mainline customer at the beginning of 2010, when the Grand Alliance downsized its Far East-Europe services and scrapped its former EU-1 service. This was the start of four years of falling container traffic at the terminal after it failed to attract new business.
The 54-hectare terminal opened in 2001 as Ceres Paragon with an annual capacity to handle 1.2 million TEU along its 400m berth and an additional berth of 615m in the Amerika haven.
The terminal had a unique design known as ship-in-a-slip, equipped with nine container cranes and a fleet of 39 straddle carriers. According to the announcement four of the cranes have been sold off and the remainders are to be disposed of soon, while the straddle carriers have been moved to HPH’s ECT Home Terminal in Rotterdam.
ACT is located 15km from the North Sea to which it is connected by the Noordzee kanaal and the Ijmuiden locks, three hours away from the pilot station. Due to the size of the locks and the canal depth, the terminal is restricted to ships of 8,000 TEU or less, though it was designed to handle larger ships.
The announcement said that “HPH had planned to operate ACT as a small, mature deep-sea container terminal, which would be kept operational until the arrival of a new super post-panamax lock at IJmuiden, due by 2019. However, declining prospects for the terminal and increased competition from ports in the North Continent forced HPH to shut the facility.”