[photopress:train1.jpg,full,alignright]A fair statement is that China’s lack of rail capacity to handle the vastly increased and increasing number of containers has become a bottleneck. Something must be done about it and something is being done about it.
The figures are persuasive.
Last year, only 1.5 percent of the China’s total container turnover of 75.8 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent of units so think of it as one container) was shipped to and from ports through railways.
According to the Ministry of Communications this is far below the 30 percent in Canada and Australia. In fact, in both those countries there are constant complaints that rail is being underutilized and efforts are in hand to move the percentages higher. The United States is about 49 percent, France 40 percent and Britain 30 percent.
Note that in all these countries there were concerted efforts by the trucking industries to prove that rail is ‘old-fashioned’ and inefficient’ and that the trucking industry subsidizes the road network. This is demonstrably not true. In China, as in other countries, rail as a means of moving containers is massively underutilized.
There is now an 11th Five-Year Plan to boost the mainland’s rail container transport network. The Ministry of Railways expects the rail containerized cargo volume will increase to 10 million TEUs in 2010 — and that seems a fairly solid figure — which would mean aims to keep up with the increase in containers and move it up a bit.
As reported the ministry has formed a large-scale Sino-overseas rail joint venture to get funding and management experience. NWS Holdings, the public works and transport unit of Hong Kong real estate developer New World Development, plans to form an RMB12 billion ($1.53 billion) joint venture with mainland rail transport firms to develop and manage 18 large-scale pivotal rail container terminals in 18 major cities on the Chinese mainland.
Tsang Yam Pui, executive director of NWS Holdings, said the group was confident of the project’s growth potential. He said, ‘The Chinese mainland has experienced rapid economic growth and there’s a soaring demand in logistics service. Moreover, the territory is vast in China, where specialized rail networks for both passenger traffic and freight transport will be developed over time. As such the growth potential of developing large-scale pivotal rail container terminals is enormous.’
The Ministry of Railways is also working on improving rail transport capacity, service reliability. At the same time, and again as reported, it has signed a letter of intent with Russia’s Railway RZD and Germany’s Deutsche Bahn AG ago to expand rail freight traffic between China’s mainland and Europe.
Su Shunhu, vice director of the transport division under the Ministry of Railway, said, ‘Rail container transport is the future of rail transport. Rail shipment is more speedy, safe and energy-efficient than by trucks and ships.’
According to the State Council, China’s Cabinet, the plan is to spend at least RMB 2 trillion or RMB100 billion annually, to expand China’s rail network by 35 percent to 100,000 kilometers by 2020. To realize this China has to double the annual expenditure on rail projects from around RMB50 billion.
Source: Shanghai Daily