A new freight train service between the Chinese city of Yiwu – known as ‘largest small commodity wholesale market in the world’ - and London was launched on January 1.
Its transit time for the 12 000-kilometre route is 18 days, and it runs via Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France – with delivery/collection stops in Germany and France.
The operating company is Chinese cross-border trade service provider, Yiwu Timex Industrial Investment Co, which has also been running freight trains twice a week between China and Madrid in Spain, via the German city of Duisburg, for more than a year.
Currently, there are four weekly blocktrain services between China and Duisburg, and three weekly services between Beijing and Hamburg, established by China Rail in 2008.
The big sales pitch for cargo train transportation on the China-Western Europe ‘Silk Road’ is that it is 50% less costly than airfreight and the transit time is more than 50% shorter than by seafreight.
