La Spezia Orders 22 Cabinless Cranes for Remote Operation

Contship has contracted for four ship-to-shore cranes and 18 yard cranes — electric rubber-tyred gantries, rail-mounted gantries and cantilever rail-mounted gantries — worth €90 million, reported on 28 August 2026. All 22 units are cabinless, enabling remote-controlled operation, and every machine is electrically powered, including the terminal's first electric RTGs.

The sensing package is specified alongside the mechanics: optical character recognition for container identification, digital truck-position tracking, and vessel-profile scanning. The ship-to-shore cranes will handle vessels up to 24,000 TEU and allow three ultra-large vessels to be worked simultaneously. Delivery runs 24 to 28 months from signing, inside a wider €350 million programme to lift La Spezia Container Terminal capacity toward 2 million TEU and raise the intermodal share from 33% to 50%.

Removing the cab is the decision that reclassifies everything else. In a crane with an operator seat, the cameras and OCR are aids — useful, and if one fails the operator is still looking at the container. Without a cab there is no fallback human perception: the wireless control link, the video path, the position sensing and the profile scan are the only way the operator knows what is happening, which makes latency, availability and failure behaviour safety-relevant rather than merely inconvenient.

This is also the brownfield pattern that mid-size terminals keep converging on, and it is worth naming because it differs from the greenfield fully automated yard. Electrify the yard equipment, strip the cabs, and move the operators into a control room, while the terminal keeps running. The integration work is consequently constrained by an operating terminal rather than by a construction schedule, which is a harder problem and a more common one.