A freight express train connecting the city of Linyi, in East China’s Shandong Province, to Hairatan, Afghanistan, has embarked on its journey from Linyi recently.
The inaugural train, as part of the China-Europe Railway Express operated by Shandong High-Speed Group, is loaded with approximately 8 million yuan ($1.20 million) worth of locally made commodities, including textiles, chemical raw materials, hardware tools and engineering machinery. It will leave China via the Khorgos port in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and arrive in Hairatan in about 20 days.
This marks the opening of a direct rail freight route linking Shandong with Afghanistan, providing a new transport option for this coastal province to access emerging markets in Central and West Asia, and South Asia in the future.
In the past, Shandong’s exports to Afghanistan relied on either cross-border road transportation or road-rail multimodal transportation, and they were both expensive and unreliable. Supported and guided by railway and customs authorities, the train operator made every effort to meet customers’ needs and coordinated overseas transport capacity in advance, making the most of Almaty’s advantage as a major distribution center in Central Asia. It inspected goods promptly and facilitated a closed-loop transport process that covers cargo space reservation, customs clearance, transport and delivery, so as to ensure the inaugural train’s operations were safe and orderly.
Under standardized and stable operation, the train is expected to effectively address the bottlenecks of previous modes of transportation. It will provide a new land transport option that is punctual, safe and reliable for Shandong’s enterprises aiming to access the markets in Central and West Asia.
In recent years, the operator of Shandong’s China-Europe Railway Express has steadily improved international logistics corridors, establishing a “2+4+N” dual-circulation service network by capitalizing on the Jinan-Qingdao distribution center and four overseas distribution centers. It now runs 58 international routes, reaching 61 cities across 29 Belt and Road countries.
It will continue to develop diversified transport corridors, leverage the roles of the hubs both at home and abroad, and refine tailor-made logistics solutions to help local enterprises explore global markets. In this way, it will help Shandong further join in the high-quality Belt and Road cooperation and foster a new highland for high-level opening-up.
(Executive editor: Zuo Shihan)
