A new freight rail route connecting Yiwu West Railway Station in Zhejiang Province with Barking in London has been launched by China Railway.
The route, which has been dubbed the New Silk Route by the Chinese government, will take around 18 days to travel over 7,400 miles carrying a cargo of clothes, bags and other household items.
China Railway already runs services between China and other European cities, including Madrid and Hamburg. The rail line has the advantage of being cheaper than air freight and faster than sea....Here she comes!
Jack Peat, business and economics journalist and the founder of The London Economic
Not quite 'direct' the containers will be offloaded in Poland (due to 'gauge' differences) onto trains that can use the HS1 line through the Channel Tunnel and up to Barking (across the river about 5 miles away from us) can't go further north due to capacity on the lines north of London.
ReplyDeleteWe have been running for a month twice weekly groupage boxes, into Poland and the rest of the way by road. So we are keeping an eye on this as will cut another day or so off the 20 days transit we are offering on our service, but there has been a few false starts into Europe by rail, it isn't very reliable as yet though. That isn't that a big deal as the business it is being targeted at is sea that gets upgraded to air (sea around 40 days, air 5 ish) it's about 40% of the cost of air (the trade lane manager took up one of my suggestions that it is 'greener' than air which didn't go down too well with the sales director of my air division :) mind you he gets forex tips from me so can sod off!).
We don't expect an expansion over all modes, just a medium transit and cheaper service than currently, it takes on a type of service we used to have a few years ago which was a sea/air service, sea into Dubai and then air into London but the air rates dropped due to capacity to around the same as flying all the way.
It is an interesting development as far as we are concerned and so far popular with our customers (mostly supermarkets) as when they upgrade to air they are taking a hit on their profit margins.