China has taken targeted measures to improve the efficiency of railway freight, while promoting intermodal transportation of railway, road and sea.
The national railway freight volume exceeded one billion tonnes in the third quarter of this year, setting a historical high for cargo transportations in a single quarter, according to the China State Railway Group Co., Ltd. on Sunday.
Data showed that in the third quarter, China's railway network handled one billion tonnes of cargo, an increase of 3.8 percent year on year, with an average daily loading of 182,000 train carriages, up by 4.1 percent from the same period last year.
A total of 9.58 million TEUs have been delivered on the railway network during the period, a year-on-year increase of 17.3 percent.
Major energy transportation lines such as Datong-Qinhuangdao Railway, Haolebaoji-Ji'an Railway and Lanzhou-Xinjiang Railway have increased the operation frequency of trains each with a capacity of 10,000 tonnes.
In the third quarter, the railway network sent 520 million tonnes of coal, representing a year-on-year increase of 3.5 percent. Among them, 21.59 million tonnes departed from northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, one of the country's richest energy bases, up 38 percent year on year.
"We have increased the frequency of 'passenger train-like' shuttle trains for coal transportation and launched more 10,000-tonne trains on the Urumqi-Junggar Basin Railway and Aksu-Kashgar section of Southern Xinjiang Railway, to guarantee the transportation of coal mined in Xinjiang," said Yu Zeming, a dispatcher of the Hami Railway Logistics Center of the China Railway Urumqi Bureau Group.
The "passenger train-like" shuttle freight train runs between coal producing areas and downstream enterprises based on the needs of cargo owners, with fixed loading and unloading sites, fixed operating routes and fixed timetables, which helps reduce inter-regional logistics costs.
China has also accelerated the establishment of an intermodal transport network. Freight routes connecting to road transportation have covered all provincial capitals across the country, while those connecting to sea transportation have covered major ports.
"We usually grasp the cargo loading volume of ships and the information of cargos loaded, to facilitate the integrated and efficient operation of the sea-rail intermodal transportation. Meanwhile, we have collaborated with customs authorities to continuously optimize operation links, reducing the average time for inspecting a single container from 10 minutes to 7 minutes," said Huang Jiangnan, director of Qinzhou Port East Railway Station of Costal Railway Company of China Railway Nanning Bureau Group.
Relevant authorities have been improving the functions of the smart platform for railway freight. Currently, the proportion of electronic railway waybills has reached more than 97 percent, making concessions on profits of about 42.34 billion yuan (about 5.93 billion U.S. dollars) to enterprises.
China takes targeted measures to facilitate railway freight
