This story appeared in Kalmbach’s Trains NewsWire today. Good reporting Kalmbach! As far as intermodal between Europe and the Far East my question is this: "You mean to say they’re just now getting around to doing it? You’ve got to be kidding! "
Here’s the story in case you haven’t already read it on NewsWire:
Germany, China test intermodal service via Trans-Siberian
January 14, 2008
HAMBURG, Germany - A container train is in the midst of a 20-day journey between Beijing and Hamburg by way of Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, and Poland, this week, a test that could lead to more containers across Asia, Biz China News reported. The experiment aims to see if the rail route is preferable to ships via the Suez Canal.
The route is known as the Eurasian Land Bridge, and it represents a partnership between Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, the Russian and Chinese railways, and the national railroads of Mongolia, Poland, and Belarus. The groups intend to develop the Beijing-Europe route as a competitor to ships and planes.
Norbert Bensel, a member of Deutsche Bahn’s board, said the planned 15- to 18-day journey for regular trains cuts transit times in half from what ocean-shipping companies can offer. However, Bensel said such issues as customs and border inspections haven’t yet been hammered out.
I see you have rarely posted and I don’t want to discourage your interest – and I appreciate your posting this news item since I did not notice it in the flood of news I get. So please take my comments as not directed at you personally.
This is not new. It was tried in the 1990s by CSX-Sealand in a joint venture with European partners. Probably someone tried it, or at least thought about trying it, well before that time (there are old railroaders and there are bold railroaders, but there are no old, bold railroaders).
It didn’t pay. A major part of the problem is that ocean liner strings, even scheduled liner strings, are fantastically erratic due to weather, freight fluctuations, and other normal calamities, and calling up the Deutsche Bahn on Monday and saying “No train today,” on Tuesday “We have a train but it’s maybe 8 or 9 hours late, or maybe 12 hours late, but I don’t know until the Russians deliver it,” and on Wednesday “Do you mind, our train is twice as long as yesterday, will that be a problem?” just doesn’t cut it when your train slot starts at 14:42 and not 14:41 and certainly not 14:43! U.S. railroads can make variability work by being extremely flexible, making constant adjustments, and applying a lot of brute force, but passenger schedules do not work with that kind of railroading at all, and if European railroading has anything, it has a LOT of passenger schedules.
I don’t know what they’re doing now, and I wish them all the luck in the world. Maybe they will use low, low rates to attract an immense volume of containers, stack them in a mountain on each end, and dole them out in steady, predictable increments onto the European railway system. That could work if the goods are low, low value and the consignees don’t mind if sometimes they get no containers for a week and other times
Besides, there is intermodal traffic between the far east and Europe with some level of consistency. But don’t forget it’s very impractical. Every single railcar crossing from the EU into Russia or visa versa not only has to go through customs, but either has to be placed on russian bogies or be offloaded and loaded onto russian railcars entirely (since the EU is standard gauge and Russia has 2 mtr wide gauge). Then, if the cargo originated outside of Russia in the far East, then this whole thing of changing bogies or cars plays itself twice, since most Asian countries use standard gauge as well.
Imagine doing all of that on a scale comparible to US intermodal traffic - even if there was such a thing as cooperation between all parties involved, this would be pretty much impossible to keep up over a longer period of time and still have happy customers at both ends of the line.
It would’t be all that impractical. American railroads “rubbered” most trailers and containers across town in Chicago, and other places, to connecting roads for years. It wasn’t until double stacks that intermodal trains were scheduled run-throughs became the norm instead of the exception. Trailers that missed cut-offs are still rubbered across town, but that’s usually just a handful a day.
With that being said, I think there just testing to try and work out the customs and security bugs, and to see if enough costumers would be intersted in this service. If they could work out that, then they could rubber everything to the nearest Russian intermodal facility. With majority of the run being in Russia, I don’t see them regauging the Trans-Siberian to European standards, but they could designate a line specifically for this international service in Europe and in China and regauge them to Russian standards, opening the oppurtunty (spell check!) for general freight moves also.
With Russia vast raw materials resources, it would
The very large steel mill at Kosice, Slovakia has 1524mm Russian gauge track bringing raw materials in on one side of the mill, while on the other side is a 1435mm Standard gauge line for shipping out finished products to the rest of Europe. Oh and by the way the mill is owned by US Steel.
Western European leaders are wary of Russia now because of the way Russia handled a few crisis lately. Specifically the way The Ukraine was treated when Russia increased the price of natural gas as well as the row with Estonia over the move of a statue of a Russian soldier commemorating WW2. And president Putin is retiring and most probably will make an immediate comeback as a kind of strong man.
I don’t think we want to become too dependant on Russia for our imports from Asia. Further, with contyainer ships forever increasing in size there will be a few ports left where the flow of containers can be handled. Moreover, those ports are an easy truckride from the vast majority of the European population.
Anybody who thinks that Russia will re-gauge their railroads to facilitate trade does not know too much about the Russian psyche. The Russian railroads were built to 5-foot gauge for military reasons (to help slow down invasions) and the fear of invasion (from either East or West) is deeply ingrained in the Russian mind.
Ok, my comments were more or less wishfull thoughts in a perfect world. But theoreticaly, Russia could stand to see large financial benefits for being a transcontinetal carrier between Europe and China (and even India, though I’m not sure if there is curently a line through the “Stans” to India), not to mention opening markets to China and Europe for domestic products. One poster mentioned this being done on a small scale in Slovakia, albiet by a US firm. This would also benefit Germany and possibly even Poland. With Germany’s faltering industrial economy and, I’ve read on another post a few months ago, that Germany and some other European countries hoping to bring freight business (spell check) back to the raillines, being a railhead gateway between Western Europe and Asia would be good start to get the (rail) ball rolling and help the economy. China (and India, again, if a line could be built) stands to win reducing transits times to Europe and getting rail acces to needed raw mareials in eastern Russia (I’d need to look it up, but I believe China has , or did have, a Russian- guaged line thru Manchuria).
But those thoughts are econmicaly driven, and a bit of wishfull thinking.
As has been mentioned, and these ponits were not lost to me earlier, Russia (Putin, mostly) has a serious problem with taking their ball and evryone else bat home when things don’t go their (his) way, cuasing alot of distrust in Europe. Noone, not even China, wants millions of dollars in cargo stuck in Russia because they got mad and “cut the pipeline” like they did in Ukraine. While part of me was glad to see people seeing a great opportunity, my jaw did drop at the thought of them trying this now with the declining relations Putin is having with everyone (from what I understand, Putin has even been screwing their relations with China). For all this to work, Russia has got to stop trying to marketing their resources, only to cut the world off at evey disagreement, and
By rubbered you mean plunked on a truck-trailer and hauled across town? If that’s what you mean than that’s pretty impratical, considering ALL containers would have to be treated this way instead of just a few which you are referring to in your example.[swg]
Hahaha! Keep dreaming. The EU can’t make their minds up about what day it’s going to be tomorrow, let alone about something like a dedicated, special gauge line. They would decide it’s a good thing for Europe, and then when planning begins none of the countries actually want the line across THEIR territory, but they do want it close enough to reap the benefits.
Very true.
That market will not be in the EU zone, unless Russia becomes a member state. The EU heavily subsidizes the agricultural market in the EU member states and levies high import penalties on foreign (ie. Non-EU) imports. It’s going to be next to impossibl
Yes by rubbered, I mean the trailer or container was unloaded at railroad A, trucked across town, and reloaded at railroad B. Also known as cross-towning. And for many years this worked, as only part of any one intermodal train, be it TOFC or COFC (COFC not being really huge market until the 80’s), was going beyond Chicago (or any other gateway, but I’ll use Chicago because that’s where I worked), so the train was usually getting unloaded at yard A anyway. It wasn’t until shipping lines (the container companies, not the railroads) wanted to ship boatloads across the US to cut shipping times thru Panama, or going around South America for the new super boats, that this practice clearly wasn’t going to work. Along comes double stacks and run-through schedules. Impractical? Yes, but in the infancy stages of intermodal,especially COFC, this worked to get the ball rolling. The new China- Germany service isn’t even an infant, it’s an embryo, with lots of operational obsticales to overcome. Then there’s the political ones. What was meaning, and reading back I should have clearer, is that for a start-up experiment with alot of bugs to work out, transloading isn’t all that impractical for the short term, the politics of cross-bordering compared to domestic cross-towning (apples to oranges) aside. If other far more important issues other than track gauge can be overcome to make this work, then the idea of regauging, or even possibly building an at-border facility to transfer directly train to train (assuming, of course, of equipment availability) that would only delay an hour or two, boder inspection aside. That is , of course, an assumption on my part that containers are handled in somewhat similar fashion as they are in the US.
Cross-towning is rare today, but it still occasionally done. I’ve did a couple before when I got “punished” by my dispatcher and got stuck doing city work. If a container misses it’s cutoff, it usually just sits around unti
If Russia and Europe had no political, legal, and infrastructure chasms to breach, there are still the cost hurdles and rail hurdles within Europe to overcome, and the origin point hurdle to overcome. Frankly I think it would be far more attractive to dump the westbound containers at the first convenient Baltic port and short-ship to European ports, rather than try and insert any significant volume into the Western European rail system. Given that most of the containers exported from Asia originate within a small radius of a port, the broad availability of very inexpensive water transportation, and the poor quality and lack of spare capacity of freight rail infrastructure within much of Asia, it would take some large improvements in trans-Siberia rail costs, and heavy expenditure to build a rail feeder network to that main stem, to attract manufacturers away from the ports.
Even if there were high quality rail lines in place, wouldn’t the cost of operations and maintanence make it difficult to compete with the cost of very large container ship service? I know there is the cost factor of transport to the port of embarkation and delivery from the destination port, but that is also a factor in the movement to and from the rail head.
I got the feeling from the article what they were trying to cut was transit time, not cost. I’d like to know what the average shipping time from the northern areas of Europe to China (oops, that should be the other way around. I don’t think China has had this large of a world trade deficit since before the Opium Wars) by boat are. They’re figuring almost a month (20 days) by rail. Any one know?
These are typical “strings” which include intermediate stops, e.g., Qingdao, Yantian. It could be done significantly faster if there was demand. Not sure there is.
If they get it down to 15 days, it’ll save time from Hong Kong, but not much from Singapore. Is this possibly more about maybe finding an alternative land route around India, the Gulf States and the Suez, as protection over future escalations? If Israel ever went to war with…anyone… the Suez would seem to be an unsafe place to be. India and China still aren’t the best of buddies either. I’m sure there’s several factors driving this, but with tensions between EU and Russia growing again, seems like a strange time to experiment hauling cargo thru there just to cut a couple of days unless there’s more to it.
Just bear with me now, I’m just thinking out loud now:
As an answer from the shipping lines to this new rail threat, wouldn’t it be possible that the shipping lines have the intermediate ports ship to one central port, either by boat or rail. Then this “string” thing could be much shorter in terms of travel time, since less stops mean less downtime. Is it possible to bring the shipping time down by so much, that shipping by rail just becomes so cost-ineffective that the whole rail line just sits empty? Obviously, if the difference comes down to say - 4 days, only time sensitive containers would be shipped by rail, and I think that’s what’s happening already. That’s the rail traffic we’re seeing today.
I’m just thinking. Because that’s an important part of wether this whole rail line is viable to start with: how much can the shipping lines compress their shipping times IF they really wanted and / or needed to?