/ world today news/ China opened the longest freight railway route in the world, which passes through the Trans-Siberian Highway in Russia and connects the city of Harbin in northeastern China with Hamburg in Germany. This was reported by the Xinhua news agency, which quoted the director general of Harbin Europe International Logistics Company, Tu Xiaoyue.
According to Tu Xiaoyue, the Harbin-Hamburg railway is distinguished by its high commercial value and low level of logistics costs, because it will take twice as long as the current road by sea and highways.
The first composition on this route departed on June 13. The duration of the journey lasts 15 days, during which time the train passes through the territory of Mongolia, Russia and Poland. In addition, at the Chinese-Mongolian and Belarusian-Polish borders, the wheels of the train will have to be changed due to the different distance between the tracks. The train will run once a week.
The length of the route exceeds 9,820 km, making it the longest of the existing transcontinental trade routes. To date, several Chinese cities, including Chongqing, Chengdu, Changsha, Hefei, Yiwu and Suzhou, have such a transport link with Europe passing through the Trans-Siberian Highway.
China’s English-language channel New China TV reported that the Harbin-Hamburg route will be used to transport electronics, spare parts and clothing produced in northern and northeastern China. German car giants Mercedes Benz and Audi, as well as Taiwanese electronics maker Foxconn, have said they plan to use this route.
According to data from the Chinese information resource CRI, the new train will transport goods with a total value of more than 4 billion yuan (about 650 million dollars) annually.
The Chinese are making plans to transit through Russia
Currently, China is actively using the Trans-Siberian Highway for cargo transportation. A few days before the first train on the Harbin-Moscow route set off, the opening of the freight line between Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and Moscow took place.
Also, in January 2015, China announced for the first time that it will build a high-speed railway line that will connect Moscow and Beijing. The cost of the route will be 1.5 trillion yuan ($242 billion) and it will be 7,000 km long, Beijing city authorities announced in January 2015. The first section of the Moscow-Kazan road is planned to be ready in 2017
Also, the Russian Far East is of interest to China. In May 2015, authorities in the Chinese province of Jilin proposed to the Primorye government to build a high-speed railway line that would connect Vladivostok with the border city of Hunchun in the PRC. The authorities in the PRC plan to have the first section of the railway line to Hunchun ready as early as August 2015.
“If it turns out that we jointly manage to continue it, it will be the first cross-border high-speed railway between Russia and China,” commented First Secretary of the Communist Party of China Committee in Jilin Province, Bain Chaolu.
Russian officials agree to cooperate with China on construction, but face a problem in attracting state and private investment inside the country. For example, the Moscow-Kazan high-speed railway project was frozen for a long time until Chinese investors agreed to finance this section.
In addition, to this day, the project for the construction of the Russian part of the bridge over the Amur River, which should connect the railways of Russia and China, remains in question. Already in 2008, an intergovernmental agreement was signed for the construction of the new bridge. Most of the work was undertaken by China (1.9 km out of a total of 2.2), which plans to complete its section by the end of 2016. Russian departments and state funds could not start construction on their part because “difficulties of an organizational and management nature”, the Russian business newspaper “Vedomosti” reported on April 20, 2015.
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