By Rui Hu, EDITOR

At 10:58 a.m. on June 30, a container train of China Railway Express fully loaded with 70 standard containers of cargo started from the port operating zone of Qinzhou Railway Container Center Station, Guangxi en route to Duisburg, Germany.

Qinzhou Railway Container Center Station

It marked the official operation of the Center Station, a vital project of the sea-rail intermodal transport of New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor under the China-Singapore (Chongqing) Demonstration Initiative on Strategic Connectivity (CCI-ILSTC). Qinzhou Port has realized same-platform transshipping of sea-rail and road-rail transport, ideally handling the last and critical steps of the multimodal transport between railways and ports and between roads and railways.

The trains which carried display screens, televisions, clothing, shoes, and hats imported from South Asian countries like Vietnam would pass through Kazakhstan, Russia, Poland, and other regions and were expected to arrive in Duisburg in about 20 days.

After the official operation of ILSTC in 2017, container trains from Beibu Gulf Port to places like Chongqing have multiplied, realizing leaps from one shift per month, week, day to three times per day. These trains have achieved regular operation in five directions to cities like Chongqing, Chengdu, and Kunming, connecting most western provinces and regions.

With the growth in the number of two-way trains, the existing infrastructure can no longer meet the increasing demand for cargo transportation. To solve the bottleneck of transportation development, the Phase-I project of the Center Station began in July 2018. Covering an area of about 0.85 square kilometers, it has a designed handling capacity of 1.05 million TEU per year, with a total investment of about 900 million RMB.

Up to now, 2019 has seen 437 trains operating via ILSTC for rail-sea trade between Chongqing and Beibu Gulf, Guangxi, totaling nearly 1,100. The cumulative foreign and domestic trade value reached about 530 million USD and 2.82 billion RMB, respectively. The main products include over 300 varieties such as finished automobiles and parts, architectural pottery, chemical raw materials and products, light industrial and pharmaceutical products (beverage), grain, and fresh frozen goods, which are sent to 190 ports of 80 countries and regions in 6 continents.

Source: Hualong Net