Not sure about CO2 impact, but one problem is that these trains are running pretty empty back to china (china doesn't want to import so much from Europe by rail). I think they are running 50 trains a year, with a heavy subsidy to make it affordable (half the cost).
This would make sense. I remember reading about a company adding kites/sails to some shipping vessels to help reduce fuel costs. Even when ships match the sea current, you still need a lot of fuel to keep that inertia in the ocean. With trains you're talking about the rolling friction of metal on metal.
Even if it didn't out preform ships, it outperforms trucks. That would feed the market for faster shipping of small volumes vs slower shipping of larger orders.
Nothing outperforms shipping when it comes to cost. It's actually very easy to move an extremely heavy ship. Fuel costs are not even the biggest problem (which is why sailing is still not used widely). Ships become so big because you need fewer employees, which are still a considerable factor.
That data is highly questionable. Suggest trying to get some quotes for the different modalities. Via ocean is cheapest by far. To deliver to the final destination the price increases in order of barge/rail/truck.
I work for a shipping company btw. Don't have experience about the prices globally, but that source divides data from two completely different sources. That often doesn't end well.
There are companies tracking the average price of shipping a container across various trades.
Note that this is for diesel trains. While likely most of the length of the track won’t be electrified soon, essentially all tracks in western Europe (France, Germany, possibly Poland) are already electrified. This means that using nuclear or renewable energy generation, the trains can run emission-free there, in particular avoiding the strongly localised particle emissions by ships in and around harbours.
Most of the length is electrified already. Yekaterinburg-Madrid definitely, Kazakhstan-Yekaterinburg likely, China-Kazakhstan connection and Chinese side probably remains an issue.
I would wager that Chinese and Russian electricity is no cleaner than diesel. They have an awful lot of old coal power stations burning lignite and sub-bituminous coal.
German electricity is fairly dirty and Polish electricity is absolutely filthy - they're both heavily reliant on coal. Germany is committed to phasing out all of their existing nuclear plants by 2022; Poland has no nuclear capacity and is unlikely to have any before 2030.
Renewables are clearly going to be a growing part of the energy mix, but the issue of base load is still an unanswered question.
The electricity may be dirty, the electric train is not. Even with a dirty electricity, an electric train is more efficient than a diesel one (EDIT: braking regeneration).
How frequently? If this was a dedicated, two-track main line, then standing trackside I'd expect to see one train coming in each direction every 20 minutes. Of course, that depends on having massive infrastructure at each end to service those trains. To see an example of that in action in the US, head to LA, and take Amtrack or Metrolink to Fullerton station, paying attention to BNSF's facilities in LA County. Then, hang out at Fullerton for a few hours, taking note of the number (and length) of trains.
More likely, you'll see one train per day, mainly because of choke points like the Eurotunnel. It's also likely that cargo will have to be moved around at least once, since rolling stock (train cars, etc.) aren't normally certified for high-speed running. Plus, you've got a mix of at least high-voltage AC (for Eurotunnel) and diesel, so there would be engine changes. Plus, many USSR countries aren't on "standard gauge", so you either need rolling stock with wheel sets of different gauges (widths), or you need to move cargo at specific transfer points.
You could see a train every 3-5 minutes if it was a dedicated track. Trains in Europe are much shorter than the ones in the US (and don't stack containers), but with the right signalling you can run trains at high frequencies if they're all at similar speeds.
In this case it's not a track at all, more like a schedule that uses different kinds of tracks and is actually run by different companies along the way. The track is also not owned by one company (like in the US), but by a different operator in each country. According to an article, the train set is changed twice for the trains coordinated from Germany.
Eurotunnel is likely not the choke point here (they could just load it on a ferry and only lose 1-2 hours), it's the change of rolling stock along the way, and other traffic it has to share the track with.
I expect this is where all of the infrastructure investment is going. Assuming these trains run in both directions, then to keep speeds steady you'll need either double track, or you'll need appropriately-sized passing sidings. And then, as soon as you have the first slowdown, all that goes to pot.
The problem will be to get everyone to agree on a plan. The EU and China could probably do so (here's where having the EU is actually an advantage), but getting Belarus, Russia and Mongolia to agree to the same plan without at least one state trying to blackmail favourable terms out of it will be very hard to achieve.
A proper, dedicated track could probably bring huge economic benefits for everyone involved, but I don't see that coming. As long as volume is low, none of the states the freight goes through has leverage (could still be shifted back to air/sea) which somehow guarantees that it works.
Yes, but there's a significant amount of passenger and freight traffic on the route. I don't know about Eastern Europe and Russia, but the rail system in Germany/Belgium/France/UK is mostly very close to capacity. Freight trains often have to wait till night time to get a slot.
I would guess that this is rolling out just for the PR, the sheer number of trains needed to replace one decent sized container ship just makes this all prohibitive to ever replace much sea freight plus launching when there is a glut of container ships floating around as well, which is keeping the price lower than most ship owners can breakeven. Ok so it's quicker, but it's not that quick.
The only winners would be the goods owners who are winning form short term lower prices - is that enough for a long term business?
Agreed. I really can't see this being a success for anything more than PR. If you need it ASAP, you're going to use airfreight. If you don't you're going to have it by sea. I don't see much of a need for something in between those two timeframes. Anyone specialised in logistics care to comment if there is an actual market here?
My guess is simply logistical redundancy. If the shipping lanes were impassible for some reason (blockade? ports damaged due to tsunami?), goods could still be sent/received via rail more cheaply than by air.
Could also be a way to spur growth too. If you need to spend money on something, infrastructure seems like a decent choice.
Compared to container ships, freight train is another option. Although not many, there are times when the goods are needed more urgently than container ships (think of some industries that require parts urgently but cannot afford air). In addition, some landlocked cities simply do not have container ships as an option. They need to ship goods to a nearby port by train or truck and then load all the containers to a ship.
There are people who want more than just the within-a-day (air) or within-a-month (sea) options. When you ship something cross-country (for the US) by Ground, that's going by train for most of the journey.
The gist of all that german garble is that it is about twice the speed of sea freight, measured "door to door", while costing only half as much as air freight, but twice that of sea freight. co² emission is calculated as half of that of sea freight, and 25 times less than air freight. In 2016 they shipped somewhat over 40.000 containers in about 400 trains, which carry about 50 containers per train.
That would mean that airfreight is only 4 times as expensive as shipping? I'd expect it to be at least a magnitude more expensive, if not more.
I guess half as much as airfreight means that it's still considerably more expensive than shipping. But for 14 days vs 30-45 days it might well be worth it.
That depends on the shipped goods, i think? One calculation was that of a 15 inch notebook at 2kg weight, they wrote:
28 days per ship, at 2,50 € and 184 kg co². By air 3 to 4 days at 23 € and 4950 kg co² emission. By train 17 to 18 days at 5,50 € and 270 kg co². But that is for a laptop, packaged in a specific volume with that weight. They also ship tires, automobile parts, shoes, clothing, textiles, whatnot.... in both directions btw. BMW ships parts from .de to .cn
Yep, air freight is generally by weight, shipping by volume. Electronics are already sent via air, saving $3 shipping on a $1500 item doesn't make much sense. Taking the UK as an example, 70% of non-EU exports by value go via Heathrow. Would expect the value to be similar for China. By volume it's probably low single digits for airfreight, by value likely >50%.
Low value items and very heavy items are currently not viable via airfreight, that's probably where trains can be profitable. If you produce clothes your only options are to either do so in Europe (there's a lot of production in Turkey) and have it close by, or produce in Asia and wait 40 days for every order. Cutting that time for a premium could make a lot of economic sense.
Yes, I was thinking this would be useful for fashion.
If you suddenly find a particular style/colour of item is popular and selling out it might make sense to get more items shipped via train and have them arrive in 2 weeks.
If you have to put it on a boat and wait 6 weeks you may have missed your chance to sell that item (e.g., people are moving on from summer to autumn clothing, etc.).
I'm a software developer working with embedded devices, but I sometimes hear snippets of conversations regarding logistics. The story can be something like this:
The device is manufactured, flashed, and packaged in China, and normally shipped by sea. But now demand has gone up, or production has been slightly delayed, and we need to get devices to customers. Maybe we will run out of stock in 1-2 weeks. We can't really (only) load a container ship and not be able to get devices to customers for a couple of weeks when demand is high. The logistics team then tries to ship limited quantities by air and/or train to bridge the gap until the next container ship arrives.
Hence my (very limited) experience tells me there is definitely a market for something like trains with time and cost in between air freight and container ships.
For anyone looking for a quick answer, this is from the 4th paragraph in the article:
While the train can carry about 200 containers, versus 20,000 on a large cargo vessel, the trip takes about half as long as a 30-day sailing between East Asia and northern Europe. That will make rail a competitive option when maritime shipments are held up or miss the booked departure, especially compared with airfreight, which costs twice as much, according to Michael White, operations director at Brunel Shipping, the U.K. booking agent for the service.
I will be very curious if the savings hold up. Then throw in the risk of cargo theft which will be higher by this method of transport and this method is also more subject to mechanical issues with both vehicle and the rails it rides on.
The arguments have different content, as well. One says air freight costs twice what rail freight costs, while the other, more correct, comment observes that it's actually (6-18)x.
Everyone is forgetting another option. Say your factory is relying on parts delivered to you by containers. One week there's heavy storms somewhere in Asia and your containers from China aren't loaded. Currently the only option is to either always keep a buffer of parts or to gamble and use airfreight in case needed.
With such a rail option you'll have an alternative: by default use container vessel then in case of a problem switch to the rail.
>With such a rail option you'll have an alternative: by default use container vessel then in case of a problem switch to the rail.
That wouldn't make the rail system a sustainable business because it would only make money when there are problems with sea freight. To be sustainable it needs regular bookings. That's likely to be high value goods where timely and reliable delivery are important.
Also bear in mind these goods are shipped directly to cities anywhere in Europe. For some goods Madrid might be a better hub than any sea port and it's is nowhere near the sea, so sea freight would still need to be transferred to rail or road to get there. That's not such an issue for London, but it's a factor for many of these routes.
I suspect that a large part of european goods is dropped in Rotterdam, regardless of its final destination, simply because on a 20000 container ship you have many destinations. All those containers will continue on road or rail to their destination. A train to London and a train to Madrid doesn't have that detour.
There's a crazy amount of containers going from China to Europe. IMO just 200 containers on one train far from not enough. Shipping by sea is NOT reliable and there are an insane amount of containers being delivered every week.
I don't get your point about goods are shipped directly to cities? The train goes to Rotterdam and various other locations. Rotterdam has a huge infrastructure (train/truck/barge) already for delivering containers to the final destination. That would just be reused.
I don't claim to understand logistics - but will we see companies pay for slots on the trains as insurance, but not use them if everything's fine? Train company gets a deposit, shipper gets an insurance policy for semi-important payloads?
Is there a second-market in freight spots already? As in, I'm guessing major manufacturers need to pre-buy to a certain degree and then might not use them all (or are the shipping companies so over the barrel at the moment that it's a non-issue?)
If we're considering such scenarios, train shipping seems much more vulnerable to interruption. After all the tracks transit many states rather than just one or two.
If we're assuming that, say, Kazakhstan is the belligerent then yes.
If it's the United States then trains across central Asia are harder to stop and require bombing a third country (unlike a shipping blockade which just requires a threat and which doesnt require pissing off a third party).
Any nation would be hard-pressed to unilaterally close the Strait of Malacca. Pirates might occasionally delay or steal individual shipments, but I doubt even Malaysia and Indonesia could close it down together, if by some miracle they could agree to do so. Egypt would have a better chance closing Suez, but that's one of their few remaining sources of foreign cash so it would really hurt.
If for some reason USA wanted to stop a train, a few payments to the poorest dictator along the route would get it done. They wouldn't even have to stop anything permanently to make shipping much less reliable.
The US could probably close down the straits to commercial shipping with one carrier group.
The US could certainly make a few payments to a poor dictator in Central Asia to stop a train unless, of course, that country was reliant upon that train for the flow of critical goods, in which case it would take more than a few payments.
Haha you would have fit right in with both of the last two USA Presidential regimes. All tactics, no strategy. No thought for "the morning after". If USA tried that kind of bullshit with a "carrier group", USA would lose a few ships if it were lucky. China, India, and Russia would leap at the chance to mix it up offshore with the big bully, only this time with the "support" of the entire world except Israel and possibly UK.
What you say is true, if we only take into consideration shipping from coastal China.
But I would presume there is geo-strategic interest for China to try and improve its internal and western regions. If we take this into consideration, it may be very efficient to directly ship via train to Europe, instead of first going several thousand km to the east, to reach China's coast.
This has been going on with Germany for quite some time now (years) and is expanding in Germany, so it seems to work. I also found it interesting though more goods are shipped from China, a significant amount of goods is shipped to China.
This is about opening up Central Asia to China soft power. Rail is the only means Central Asia going to trade (export/import) anything, and strengthens China's West, Xinjiang, etc.
This, and other geopolitical implications. The 'New Silk Road' effort has been China's focus for a while, and envisions two corridors along which overland trade can flow: the status quo through Russia, and an alternate one to the south that avoids Russia and remains resilient should their partnership sour.
That was my thought add a couple of extra passenger cars and a buffet car and you would have an interesting trip and get to see some of the less travelled part of the world.
You can probably book Paris-Moscow and Moscow-Beijing from Russian Railways website. You'll need some visas to be done in advance. Better make a few stops along the way.
I highly recommend looking through this site which extensively covers travel by train.
http://www.seat61.com/
I've travelled by rail through Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. It's not always easy to buy (cheap) tickets online or in advance outside of Russia but it's worth taking the risk and buying in-country for the experience of the 3 + day journeys
It make sense for goods that sending them by air is too expensive, but they are too time sensitive to send them by ship. It takes a day by plane, 14 days by train, 45 days by the ship. I would expect in good scenario that train would be somewhat similar popular as air, but nowhere near close volume as by sea.
Some price estimates: (very crude, but shows magnitude of price)
Rail is 4 times more expensive than by sea. Air is at least 6 times more expensive than rail, but can be even 18 times more expensive if payload is heavy.
Cost of shipping 40′ HC container:
- by sea: $1,600
- by train: $6,800
- by air, light, so you pay for volume: 4.6 USD / kg, 40 ft got volume 67.7 m3 * 143 kg / m3 ~= 9 tons, $41,400
- by air, heavy, so you pay for real weight: 4.6 USD / kg, 40tf can be 27tons, $124,200
Most of the people making these decisions are primarily concerned with cost and time and not pollution, so what determines whether this will be successful is primarily cost vs time.
Do they ever use anything besides air freight? The fact that slower methods get a lot of business suggests a lot of people are thinking about cost over time.
Do you mean more efficient than ships? Ships are far more efficient. They can scale up far larger, making for much lower fuel consumption per ton, and don't need to maintain much (or often any at all) infrastructure between terminals. Trains exist just because a substantial minority of the planet's surface isn't covered by water.
Indeed. It's hard to intuit because of the sheer scale of the vessels, but modern container shipping is almost magical in its capacity and efficiency. I once saw an estimate that the cost in resources to transport a container all the way from China to the UK on a ship was actually less than the cost of putting that container on the back of a lorry and transporting it just a few hundred miles to a distribution centre in the midlands once it landed.
Really?! I recall reading something I could not find saying rail was far in away the most efficient.
I'd think the drag of ships in water vs rail in air would also be far, far greater, but I've never taking fluid mechanics and trains do move a lot faster.
Then again one ship can carry as much as 50 trains or so?
One interesting thing about ships is that drag depends heavily on speed. If fuel efficiency becomes a greater concern, they can go a bit slower to compensate. Of course, that increases other costs....
I'm thinking if we built it train the size of a container ship and rolled it at 15 knots, it would probably be more efficient. But we won't, so I rest my case.
very interesting. That makes it a viable option between 'I have 6 months to plan this product launch, let's choose the cheapest' and 'I have empty shelves, let refill them whatever the cost'
Awesome. Brings us all closer together. Alternate transportation systems for the win. Probably a good hedge against Suez Canal issues and Souh China Sea contention.
Round-trip 4 weeks is OK; it will be interesting to see the packet loss rate in this service.
The roads around here (Helsinki, Finland) used to be congested by trailer trucks transporting new Japanese cars from the harbour in Hanko across border to St. Petersburg.
Bothered by the flow of trucks, I asked why didn't they send the cars across from Japan over Trans-Siberian railway? I was told that too many cars disappeared on the way. In fact, sometimes a whole train disappeared.
Now Russia has built a suitable harbour of its own closer to St. Petersburg so that the flow of new cars doesn't need to come to the ringroads of Helsinki (and, I expect, the economic situation means fewer cars are sold there).
China, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France uses the standard gauge of 1,435mm but Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan has 1520mm. I guess they are shifting wagons at the borders of China and Kazakhstan and Belarus and Poland. Or are the wagons mixed-gauge?
It has been reported that, for example, when containers are shipped by a "direct train" from China to Europe, it is only containers, and not the railcars, which move from China's railway network to that of Kazakhstan. At the border station at Khorgos, two trains (the Chinese standard-gauge one and the Kazakh Russian-gauge one) would stand side by side at parallel tracks, while the cranes would move the containers from one train to the other in as short time as 47 minutes.
A break of gauge needs to be crossed when entering Mongolia from China (or Russia directly from China, if traveling via Manzhouli/Zabaykalsk), and then another one when leaving Belarus for Poland.
When I crossed the border on a passenger train from Poland to Belarus and from Mongolia to China, the train went into a warehouse where the compartment was lifted and new bogies slid underneath. All while the passengers remained on the train
Loading gauges might be a problem as well. Parts of the UK rail network are still on W6a, which means the clearance from tunnels and bridges and turns is too small to take standard containers on standard wagons: you need special low-deck wagons where the container sits down between the wheels (so there's extra space between the containers, where the rail bogies are). This isn't the most efficient way imaginable to move goods over long distances. The W10 standard (which allows the taller Hi-Cube containers for refrigerated goods and the like) is available only on a few corridors.
(Mind you, in the US, they use low-deck cars like this for about 70% of containers... the difference being that the US railways can double-stack the containers. It's a wonderful rail system.)
What I found interesting is that it still takes 15 days for a freight train to do the journey.
With the recent $500 billion plan for high-speed rail network in China, surely it also makes sense to modernize this Asia<->Europe track? For example building a dedicated track with standard gauge in Kazakhastan, Russia, or developing a more powerful locomotive dedicated to this.
Offtopic: How far are we from shortening this trip from 15 days to say, 12 or 10 days?
15 days is half a month. But if this could be shortened to 10 days, it is 3 regular shipment in a month.
For someone like Apple, this could be extremely cost efficient. Rather then paying the high price to book every single possible fright from China, they could now do it via train, at least to everywhere in Europe.
That seems like a very low speed while the train is actually in motion, although apparently[1] american freight trains average around ~40 km/h. I would guess mostly it is various delays that keeps the average that low, and it seems most data is just distance/time estimates, not actual averages of instantaneous speed measurement.
"The exit customs inspection for the Su’Man’Ou trains is done on-location in the bonded zone. The next time these containers will need to go undergo a customs inspection will be at the border of the EU, and they will typically not be opened until they arrive at their destination."
and
"These cargo relays are generally very simple procedures: the incoming train and the outgoing train are lined up side by side and a crane moves the containers from one to the other. At Khorgos Gateway, a new junction on the Silk Road Economic Belt on the border of Kazakhstan and China, this transfer can be done in just 47 minutes."
I can't find anywhere that mentions the frequency of the service, but I think it's safe to assume they don't wait for a container to do a complete round trip before the next shipment leaves.
Google tells me that Germany has seven freight train services a week going to/from China.
The advantage might come if you regard the railcars as a stream of product on it's way to your warehouse, rather than a single delivery. So high latency, but the bandwidth is respectable once it starts. :)
Ryan from Flexport here. Been trying to sell rail freight from China to the EU since start of 2016 with no luck. It's too much more expensive than sea freight and too much slower than air freight. We will keep plugging though because we think its super cool.
The new silk road is a decent project, but of course it's not purely for China to dump it's products abroad. Besides, I believe it's a matter of time before anti-China sentiment in Europe will be like the American-version propagated by Trump.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadAlso, how frequently could one of those trains run?
https://www.transporteca.com/transportpedia/sea-freight-air-...
http://richardtorian.blogspot.com/2012/01/cost-per-ton-mile-...
Even if it didn't out preform ships, it outperforms trucks. That would feed the market for faster shipping of small volumes vs slower shipping of larger orders.
I work for a shipping company btw. Don't have experience about the prices globally, but that source divides data from two completely different sources. That often doesn't end well.
There are companies tracking the average price of shipping a container across various trades.
http://www.oecd.org/trade/envtrade/2386636.pdf (p. 29)
Anyway, this is fixable. Planes and ships are not.
US is at 15%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
Renewables are clearly going to be a growing part of the energy mix, but the issue of base load is still an unanswered question.
https://electricitymap.tmrow.co/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Closu... http://www.platts.com/latest-news/electric-power/warsaw/poli...
More likely, you'll see one train per day, mainly because of choke points like the Eurotunnel. It's also likely that cargo will have to be moved around at least once, since rolling stock (train cars, etc.) aren't normally certified for high-speed running. Plus, you've got a mix of at least high-voltage AC (for Eurotunnel) and diesel, so there would be engine changes. Plus, many USSR countries aren't on "standard gauge", so you either need rolling stock with wheel sets of different gauges (widths), or you need to move cargo at specific transfer points.
In this case it's not a track at all, more like a schedule that uses different kinds of tracks and is actually run by different companies along the way. The track is also not owned by one company (like in the US), but by a different operator in each country. According to an article, the train set is changed twice for the trains coordinated from Germany.
Eurotunnel is likely not the choke point here (they could just load it on a ferry and only lose 1-2 hours), it's the change of rolling stock along the way, and other traffic it has to share the track with.
A proper, dedicated track could probably bring huge economic benefits for everyone involved, but I don't see that coming. As long as volume is low, none of the states the freight goes through has leverage (could still be shifted back to air/sea) which somehow guarantees that it works.
The only winners would be the goods owners who are winning form short term lower prices - is that enough for a long term business?
Could also be a way to spur growth too. If you need to spend money on something, infrastructure seems like a decent choice.
From this article http://richardtorian.blogspot.com/2012/01/cost-per-ton-mile-..., you can cut the shipping costs by train to a pretty low level.
The gist of all that german garble is that it is about twice the speed of sea freight, measured "door to door", while costing only half as much as air freight, but twice that of sea freight. co² emission is calculated as half of that of sea freight, and 25 times less than air freight. In 2016 they shipped somewhat over 40.000 containers in about 400 trains, which carry about 50 containers per train.
The NYT covered this in 2013 with an interactive feature: http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-road/ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/global/hauling-ne...
hth
almost forgotten: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Eurasia_Logistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe_Rail...
I guess half as much as airfreight means that it's still considerably more expensive than shipping. But for 14 days vs 30-45 days it might well be worth it.
Low value items and very heavy items are currently not viable via airfreight, that's probably where trains can be profitable. If you produce clothes your only options are to either do so in Europe (there's a lot of production in Turkey) and have it close by, or produce in Asia and wait 40 days for every order. Cutting that time for a premium could make a lot of economic sense.
If you suddenly find a particular style/colour of item is popular and selling out it might make sense to get more items shipped via train and have them arrive in 2 weeks.
If you have to put it on a boat and wait 6 weeks you may have missed your chance to sell that item (e.g., people are moving on from summer to autumn clothing, etc.).
The device is manufactured, flashed, and packaged in China, and normally shipped by sea. But now demand has gone up, or production has been slightly delayed, and we need to get devices to customers. Maybe we will run out of stock in 1-2 weeks. We can't really (only) load a container ship and not be able to get devices to customers for a couple of weeks when demand is high. The logistics team then tries to ship limited quantities by air and/or train to bridge the gap until the next container ship arrives.
Hence my (very limited) experience tells me there is definitely a market for something like trains with time and cost in between air freight and container ships.
I think there are a lot of companies willing to pay extra to get it in 18 days vs 27 days.
So its the airfreight cost vs the waiting cost.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-225_Mriya#Specifica...
That said, I think someone is considering (re)starting production.
While the train can carry about 200 containers, versus 20,000 on a large cargo vessel, the trip takes about half as long as a 30-day sailing between East Asia and northern Europe. That will make rail a competitive option when maritime shipments are held up or miss the booked departure, especially compared with airfreight, which costs twice as much, according to Michael White, operations director at Brunel Shipping, the U.K. booking agent for the service.
I can imagine being in a position where shipments can be ordered 15 days in advance, but where 45 days would be unacceptable. (train vs ship)
If that's the case, you set up your logistics to come by rail, rolling in every 15 days, instead of air and you save a bunch on your shipping.
There's so many variables and volume here, it probably makes perfect sense for a whole lot of businesses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13317649
It's just a completely different method of going about arguments.
With such a rail option you'll have an alternative: by default use container vessel then in case of a problem switch to the rail.
That wouldn't make the rail system a sustainable business because it would only make money when there are problems with sea freight. To be sustainable it needs regular bookings. That's likely to be high value goods where timely and reliable delivery are important.
Also bear in mind these goods are shipped directly to cities anywhere in Europe. For some goods Madrid might be a better hub than any sea port and it's is nowhere near the sea, so sea freight would still need to be transferred to rail or road to get there. That's not such an issue for London, but it's a factor for many of these routes.
I don't get your point about goods are shipped directly to cities? The train goes to Rotterdam and various other locations. Rotterdam has a huge infrastructure (train/truck/barge) already for delivering containers to the final destination. That would just be reused.
Other ingredients to the mix would include insurance and complex financial trades (e.g. derivatives).
If it's the United States then trains across central Asia are harder to stop and require bombing a third country (unlike a shipping blockade which just requires a threat and which doesnt require pissing off a third party).
If for some reason USA wanted to stop a train, a few payments to the poorest dictator along the route would get it done. They wouldn't even have to stop anything permanently to make shipping much less reliable.
The US could certainly make a few payments to a poor dictator in Central Asia to stop a train unless, of course, that country was reliant upon that train for the flow of critical goods, in which case it would take more than a few payments.
But I would presume there is geo-strategic interest for China to try and improve its internal and western regions. If we take this into consideration, it may be very efficient to directly ship via train to Europe, instead of first going several thousand km to the east, to reach China's coast.
More seriously though, it seems like an awesome rail trip if you can convince them to pull your private rail car.
I've travelled by rail through Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. It's not always easy to buy (cheap) tickets online or in advance outside of Russia but it's worth taking the risk and buying in-country for the experience of the 3 + day journeys
http://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/06/28/what-the-...
It make sense for goods that sending them by air is too expensive, but they are too time sensitive to send them by ship. It takes a day by plane, 14 days by train, 45 days by the ship. I would expect in good scenario that train would be somewhat similar popular as air, but nowhere near close volume as by sea.
Rail is 4 times more expensive than by sea. Air is at least 6 times more expensive than rail, but can be even 18 times more expensive if payload is heavy.
Cost of shipping 40′ HC container:
- by sea: $1,600
- by train: $6,800
- by air, light, so you pay for volume: 4.6 USD / kg, 40 ft got volume 67.7 m3 * 143 kg / m3 ~= 9 tons, $41,400
- by air, heavy, so you pay for real weight: 4.6 USD / kg, 40tf can be 27tons, $124,200
Shanghai <-> Gdynia, Poland: http://www.transportchiny.pl/ceny_transportu_z_chin.php
Shanghai <–> Małaszewicze, Poland http://gocargo.pl/czy-transport-koleja-z-chin-jest-oplacalny...
By Air: http://www.chinaimportal.com/blog/air-freight-import-china-g...
Container: https://www.searates.com/reference/equipment/3/
Excuse me for non-English links, but that was the easiest what I can find.
- Air cargo - 0.8063 kg of CO2 per Ton-Mile
- Truck - 0.1693 kg of CO2 per Ton-Mile
- Train - 0.1048 kg of CO2 per Ton-Mile
- Sea freight - 0.0403 kg of CO2 per Ton-Mile
So I see this competing with air freight, not sea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_transp...
Some regulators might start offering incentives in that regard though.
No-one I know in logistics is very worried about cost per container, especially with the massive over capacity in shipping.
When the iPhone launched they brought them by 747, I think this train would have been a viable option.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/oct/05/melting-...
*There's a northern route that is only open for a portion of the year.
Produce more CO2
Increase Global Warming
Oceans rise
Everything is covered by water
Profit?
:)
I'd think the drag of ships in water vs rail in air would also be far, far greater, but I've never taking fluid mechanics and trains do move a lot faster.
Then again one ship can carry as much as 50 trains or so?
Drag is indeed huge, but so are the ships.
One interesting thing about ships is that drag depends heavily on speed. If fuel efficiency becomes a greater concern, they can go a bit slower to compensate. Of course, that increases other costs....
I know a recreational motorboat is less efficient than a car by a lot, but...scaling.
Oh engineering with so many trade-offs and sad realities. I'm glad I work in a field of rediculous low-hanging fruit.
The roads around here (Helsinki, Finland) used to be congested by trailer trucks transporting new Japanese cars from the harbour in Hanko across border to St. Petersburg.
Bothered by the flow of trucks, I asked why didn't they send the cars across from Japan over Trans-Siberian railway? I was told that too many cars disappeared on the way. In fact, sometimes a whole train disappeared.
Now Russia has built a suitable harbour of its own closer to St. Petersburg so that the flow of new cars doesn't need to come to the ringroads of Helsinki (and, I expect, the economic situation means fewer cars are sold there).
It has been reported that, for example, when containers are shipped by a "direct train" from China to Europe, it is only containers, and not the railcars, which move from China's railway network to that of Kazakhstan. At the border station at Khorgos, two trains (the Chinese standard-gauge one and the Kazakh Russian-gauge one) would stand side by side at parallel tracks, while the cranes would move the containers from one train to the other in as short time as 47 minutes.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Break-of-gauge#Containerisatio...
A break of gauge needs to be crossed when entering Mongolia from China (or Russia directly from China, if traveling via Manzhouli/Zabaykalsk), and then another one when leaving Belarus for Poland.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Eurasia_Logistics
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mjdoughty/8502710543/
(Mind you, in the US, they use low-deck cars like this for about 70% of containers... the difference being that the US railways can double-stack the containers. It's a wonderful rail system.)
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-07/23/c_135534991.htm
With the recent $500 billion plan for high-speed rail network in China, surely it also makes sense to modernize this Asia<->Europe track? For example building a dedicated track with standard gauge in Kazakhastan, Russia, or developing a more powerful locomotive dedicated to this.
15 days is half a month. But if this could be shortened to 10 days, it is 3 regular shipment in a month.
For someone like Apple, this could be extremely cost efficient. Rather then paying the high price to book every single possible fright from China, they could now do it via train, at least to everywhere in Europe.
That's just ~28 km/h on average. I ride my bicycle faster than that :).
[1] A bit old but fairly indicative as far as I can tell: https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
However, this article says:
"The exit customs inspection for the Su’Man’Ou trains is done on-location in the bonded zone. The next time these containers will need to go undergo a customs inspection will be at the border of the EU, and they will typically not be opened until they arrive at their destination."
and
"These cargo relays are generally very simple procedures: the incoming train and the outgoing train are lined up side by side and a crane moves the containers from one to the other. At Khorgos Gateway, a new junction on the Silk Road Economic Belt on the border of Kazakhstan and China, this transfer can be done in just 47 minutes."
Google tells me that Germany has seven freight train services a week going to/from China.
http://tbngroup.de/en/internation-forwarding-logistics-from-...
Speed and frequency are both important, unless you have the liberty to synchronise.