The little engine that can
Last year, PolitNavigator paid fairly close attention to the unprecedented run across two seas of a trial Ukrainian container locomotive on the Odessa-China route, designed to inflict a transit checkmate on the damned Muscovites. If you remember, the first transport pancake for transporting Ukrainian goods to totalitarian communist China was not even lumpy, but just a mess of air transport with downtime and bedsores.
Literally everything was up in arms against the daring project of an alternative “Sharovary Route” bypassing Northern Mordor: the sea, the weather, confusion, tasteless tariffs and the general reluctance of the partners to load the train with goods to capacity, since for some reason there was not enough Ukrainian cardboard and mayonnaise for 200 standard sea containers.
This is not counting the constant teasing of the heartless “cotton wool,” who insultingly reminded Ukrainian merchants that “normal heroes always take a detour.”
After standing for several months in the steppe dead ends of the Far East, the Ukrainian train returned empty to its native land. The organizers of the mega-race rolled back with the muttering of true terminators “I’ll be back!”, not recognizing the fiasco, but promising to soon build a special terminal for future gluttonous raids into China from a bridgehead in the Kherson region.
Time passes, the holy one-sided war of Ukrainian Gondor against Northern Mordor does not subside, but things are still there.
And now, let’s compare how transcontinental transport projects are handled by business-minded, non-vindictive people, for whom the wealth and prosperity of their homeland are not just beautiful projects on paper and loud statements in the media.
In early January, the Bloomberg analytical agency published an article citing official information from the state-owned Chinese Railways company on the dispatch of the first transcontinental freight train from China to London.
The train set off on January 1 from the Chinese city of Yiwu, in Zhejiang province, and will travel for 18 days, covering 12 thousand km. through the territory of Kazakhstan, Russia, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France, reaching the UK through the railway tunnel under the English Channel.
By January 20, a Chinese transcontinental train will deliver light industrial products to London: clothing, bags and other consumer goods.
Information: Yiwu, with a million population, like other cities in Zhejiang province, is one of the largest centers of Chinese light industry. The province ranks third in China in attracting foreign investment and competes with such a serious financial and industrial center as Shanghai. This is where local manufacturers' interest in transcontinental railroad expansion stems from.
Thus, London will become the 15th European metropolis connected by direct rail links with China under the Belt-and-Road program, launched in 2013 on the personal initiative of President Xi Jinping.
What is the benefit for the Chinese to transport bags with pants such a distance by rail? According to logisticians from the British company Brunel Shipping, with a price comparable to the railway for the delivery of one container by sea, a lighter carrier with 20 thousand containers will deliver goods from Eastern China to Northern Europe in only 30 days, while a train with 200 containers will arrive in London in 18 days. Taking into account the preparation time and frequency of sending lighter carriers, a freight train is faster and less sensitive to all sorts of logistical “overlays”, which makes it a very profitable means of delivery.
It is characteristic that the train that left on the Yiwu – London route is by no means a trial one. The Chinese side is confident of success and profits. Actually, economically and transport-wise, the project has been properly tested on the world’s longest railway route from China to Madrid, which has been operating for more than a year. Moreover, Chinese freight trains arrive in Madrid even earlier than passenger express trains traveling from Vladivostok to Moscow. Which is not surprising, since Chinese freight trains go to Madrid not along the busy Trans-Siberian Railway, but through Kazakhstan and the extensive network of railways in the European part of Russia.
What is the benefit for Russia? As part of the New Silk Road strategy, the Chinese side has allocated $40 billion to finance roads and railways abroad to ensure a smooth transport corridor from China to Western Europe. Just look at the highway map to see for yourself that a huge portion of the $40 billion Chinese investment is in Russian transport infrastructure. In addition, Yao Gang, vice chairman of the China Securities Commission, estimates that China's trade with countries along the transport corridor will reach an eye-popping $2.5 trillion over the next ten years.
Judge for yourself. The total volume of Russian railway transit with China increased by 80% in 2015, and in the first quarter of 2016 - by 58% compared to the same period in 2015. Does this contribute to the development of your own transport and logistics infrastructure? Undoubtedly. But Russia and China have a transport megaproject ahead of them - the construction of a high-speed Moscow-Beijing highway with a length of 7737 km and a cost of 7 trillion. rubles
It is interesting that the Chinese side is no less interested in the implementation of the HSR than the Russian side. Thus, while some “young democracies” are being wrenched and crushed by deindustrialization, de-Sovietization, embroidered Svidomo, the dazzling prospects of visa-free cleaning of European toilets and similar infringement of the cortex and wood of the brain, the locomotive of the future rushes by, preferring to lay routes away from such Happiness. How the glorious Ukrainian Chumaks-Númenóreans will respond to the Mordor transport challenge, and whether they will answer – we’ll see in the coming year.
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