On 18 Aug. 2022, China’s Office of the Leading Group for Promoting the Belt and Road Initiative released the “2021 China-Europe Freight Trains Development Report”(中欧班列发展报告, hereinafter “the Report”).
The China-Europe Railway Express is an international railway network for transporting containers between China and European countries along the routes.
The Report shows that, with over 1,000 train trips every month, the China-Europe Railway Express had carried out a total of 49,000 freight train trips and had transported 4.432 million TEU containers by the end of 2021.
The transportation cost of the China-Europe Railway Express is one-fifth of that by air, and the time cost is one-fourth of that by sea.
The China-Europe Railway Express has a very wide logistics network, covering 180 cities in 23 European countries and 91 cities in China.
During the global cooperation to fight the epidemic, the China-Europe Railway Express had transported 13.62 million pieces of epidemic prevention materials, weighting 105,000 tons, by the end of 2021, which assisted the enterprises of the countries along “the Belt and Road Initiative” to resume work and production.
In the events such as the stagnation of freighters in Suez Canal in early 2021, the China-Europe Railway Express offered more flexible transportation modes to the once-stalled international supply chains.
Cover Photo by Akira on Unsplash