Ferries from Moss ferjekai

Norway's busiest ferry crossing is ten kilometres of the Oslofjord, and it is now largely electric. The Moss to Horten link carries about 3.8 million passengers and 1.8 million vehicles a year, and the ship doing most of the work runs on batteries the size of a small power station.

The numbers

• 3.8 million passengers and 1.8 million vehicles annually — the highest volume of any Norwegian ferry route.
• About 10 km across, roughly 35 minutes quay to quay.
• 107 sailings inbound and 104 outbound in our timetable.

The operator is Bastø Fosen, part of the Torghatten group, and the frequency is what you would expect of a road rather than a boat.

⚠ The ship is the story here

Bastø Electric was the world's largest battery-powered ferry when it entered service. It is 139.2 metres long and 21 metres wide, carries 600 passengers and 200 cars or 24 lorries, and runs at up to 13 knots on a battery bank of about 4.3 MWh.

Recharging it is the harder engineering problem. The shore installation delivers up to 9 MW, which is what lets the vessel make 20 to 24 crossings a day with only the loading window to charge in. The batteries and fast-charging systems come from Siemens Energy's factory in Trondheim.

What it means at the quay

Very little, which is the point. Loading and unloading happen at the same pace as a diesel ship, the crossing takes the same 35 minutes, and the only visible difference is the absence of exhaust and the charging arm that swings onto the vessel as soon as it is tied up.

What it does change is the timetable's resilience: charging is now part of the turnaround, so delays propagate slightly differently than they would on a conventional ferry.

Boarding

No reservations. Vehicles board in arrival order and payment is automatic through AutoPASS plate recognition; foot passengers cross free. With departures at short intervals a full boat costs you one sailing.

The exceptions are the Friday afternoon and Sunday evening peaks, when the fjord crossing absorbs weekend traffic on top of the commuter flow.

The other side

Horten is the western terminal, in Vestfold. The two quays are the whole route: this crossing serves nowhere else, and there are no other services from either.