XINJIANG: The China-Europe Railway Express saw a significant increase in traffic in the first half of 2024, with 7,746 train journeys passing through Horgos Port and Alataw Pass in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, an increase of 8.2 percent year-on-year.
Horgos Port in Xinjiang and the Alataw Pass handle 40 percent of freight train travel between China and Europe. As the volume of freight trains between China and Europe and trade exchanges continues to grow, the range of goods transported by these freight trains has diversified. Previously limited to items such as daily necessities and ores, it now includes large-scale equipment, automobiles, lithium batteries and other products.
Two ports in Xinjiang connect Kazakhstan in the Western Corridor on the China-Europe Railway Express route. Since China’s standard-gauge railway tracks are 85 millimeters wider than Kazakhstan’s, containers transported by trains must be transshipped at border stations. To increase the efficiency of container transshipment and improve transit efficiency, railway operators from both China and Kazakhstan have implemented various measures.
“Originally, it took us about 60 seconds to change one container. Now it only takes about 40 seconds. If each vehicle carries two containers, we can save about 40 minutes to load the train. Including other operations, it used to take about 2 hours and 10 minutes to complete the whole the transfer operation now only takes an hour and a half.” said Xie Shuyong, a gantry crane operator at Alataw Pass.
Xinjiang has started the construction of the “Urumqi Digital Railway”, which improves container exchange capabilities. They have also adopted paperless operations for the exchange of information between customs and railway departments, effectively simplifying procedures for freight trains.
Yang Rui, deputy director of the Alataw Pass Safety Production Command Center, said, “the station reserves the tracks in advance to ensure uninterrupted train arrivals and departures. The train departure speed keeps getting faster, reducing the check-in time to 5 hours.” Incoming cargo information transmission processes were also accelerated by 4 hours.”
Since its launch in 2011, the China-Europe Railway Express has reached 223 cities in 25 European countries and connected more than 100 cities in 11 Asian countries.
