The new Silk Road

First direct train service from China to the uK arrive in london

The East Wind is coming – Robert Williams reports on the new era of rail freight between Britain and China.

Let’s talk about rail freight. No, seriously. Freight trains don’t often make the news. But the East Wind – the first train to run from Britain to China – was more than your average freight train. It departed in May, carrying goods including vitamins, baby products and pharmaceuticals. Its 34 wagons, carrying 68 containers loaded with household goods such as clothes, socks, suitcases, purses and wallets worth a total of £4m, travelled 7456 miles, making it arguably the longest train journey in the world.

The 7500-mile (12,000km) journey from eastern England to eastern China took three weeks, around half the time needed for the equivalent journey by boat. Its route took it from Barking, through the Channel Tunnel into France and then through Belgium, Germany, Poland, Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan before ending its journey in Yiwu in China.

The first freight train coming from China arrived in Britain in January 2017, making London the 15th European city to be served by direct trains from China. It has joined destinations in Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Spain on a transcontinental network of more than 40 routes.

Trains heading for Europe also carry high-tech IT products such as laptop computers and mobile phones produced for multinational companies in factories in western China.

The cross-continent trade route was officially revitalised in 2013, when a train from Chongqing arrived in Duisburg, Germany via the Yuxinou (Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe) International Railway. By 2016, more than 2100 trains have been dispatched via the Yuxinou Railway, according to statistics from the China Railway Corporation.

one Belt, one Road

The train to London is just one part of China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) strategy. It is restoring the ancient ‘Silk Road’ between China and Europe by encouraging investment in Eurasian transport and logistics networks, including rail, to boost Chinese trade and investment, and economic integration. This 2000 year-old route was once travelled by Chinese silk caravans transporting their goods to Europe and Africa.

Less romantic names for the route include the ‘Eurasian Land Bridge’ or ‘Belt and Road Initiative’. What the route does provide is rail links between Pacific seaports in the Russian Far East and China and seaports in Europe; the Trans-Siberian Railway, which runs through Russia and is sometimes called the Northern East-West Corridor; and the New Eurasian Land Bridge or Second Eurasian Continental Bridge, running through China and Kazakhstan.

Trains reach Europe using either the southern branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway from northern China, or like the London train, by passing through western China and Kazakhstan and joining the Trans-Siberian at Yekaterinburg.

China’s rail system has been linked to the Trans-Siberian via north-eastern China and Mongolia. In 1990 China added a link between its rail system and the Trans-Siberian via Kazakhstan.

As well as Kazakhstan, the railways connect with other countries in Central Asia and the Middle East, including Iran. With the October 2013 completion of the rail link across the Bosphorus under the Marmaray project the New Eurasian Land Bridge now connects to Europe via Central and South Asia.

Investing in increased efficiency

As part of OBOR, China is pushing, and largely funding, a vast programme of Eurasian infrastructure investment. The China Investment Bank estimates that 900 OBOR infrastructure projects worth $US 890bn, ranging from rail to road, port and pipeline, are planned or underway in 64 countries.

Many of these investments will be directed at improving logistics processes for rail. Crossing borders, and switching between different rail gauges and back again, remains a major challenge, and an obstacle to reduced transit times.

From the 1960s until the early 1990s the Trans-Siberian railway served as the primary land bridge between Asia and Europe, until several factors caused the use of the railway for transcontinental freight to fall away. One key problem is that the railways of the former Soviet Union use a wider rail gauge than the rest of Europe and China. So the journey is as much an engineering challenge as a logistical problem. Freight must swap trains along the way, as railway gauges vary between the connecting countries.

Some of these challenges are being met with the construction of the Khorgos Gateway project. On the Kazakhstan-Chinese border, this future logistics and industrial hub is being billed as the new Dubai. This includes the 129.8ha Khorgos Gateway Inland Container Dock, a gauge-changing station for the transEurasian railway, which has capacity for six trains at one time and can process 580,000 TEUs annually. (TEU stands for Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit – the standard measure of size in the container industry.)

A new era for rail logistics

The new route unlocks a new option for shippers. At present, the choice is between an ocean-bound route, which, although cheap, is slow, or using an air carrier that is considerably faster but much more expensive.

This growing network and frequency of service is translating into higher volumes. DB says that more than 40,000 TEUs were transported between China and Germany in 2016 – a record – and it is expecting this figure to grow to 100,000 by 2020, more than triple the amount carried in 2014.

In June 2016. eight trans-Eurasian freight trains left eight Chinese cities simultaneously, heading to destinations across Europe. All were carrying royal blue TEUs with the name of the new service, China Railway (CR) Express, stencilled onto each 40-foot unit.

At present, less than 1 per cent of EUAsia trade is currently conducted overland. Most is still done by sea, and freight train services face technical and bureaucratic hurdles which vary according to country.

However, the East Wind clearly benefits from a lack of customs checks at the FrenchBritish border and from the European Union’s continued effort to create a Single European Railway Area, covering everything from signalling to fire safety standards – and a huge reduction in red tape.

For import-exporters who cannot afford to wait months for product delivery, but are also concerned about their carbon footprint, the rail service is bound to be a great new alternative.

Perhaps we should remember that the train’s name is no mere flight of fancy, but is taken from Chairman Mao’s dictum: “The east wind will prevail over the west wind.” n