A China-Europe Freight Train carrying a variety of goods set out from southwest China's Chongqing Municipality Friday en route to Duisburg, Germany, marking the 100,000th China-Europe Feight Train trip since the cross-border freight train service began operations in 2011.
Over the past 13 years, the China-Europe Freight Trains have shipped over 11 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of goods, with the value exceeding 420 billion U.S. dollars, according to China State Railway Group Co., Ltd. (China Railway).
Since the beginning of this year, more than 17,000 China-Europe Freight Train trips have been made, an increase of 11 percent year on year.
Since March this year, the number of China-Europe Freight Train trips operated in a single month has surpassed 1,600 for eight consecutive months.
Between 2016 and 2023, the number of China-Europe freight train trips surged nearly tenfold from 1,702 to over 17,000 annually, while the time required to handle 10,000 trips has been slashed from 90 months at the beginning to only six months now.
The China-Europe Freight Trains now transport over 50,000 types of goods. The value of goods transported annually grew dramatically from 8 billion U.S. dollars in 2016 to 56.7 billion U.S. dollars now.
At present, there are 93 scheduled China-Europe Railway Express routes operating at 120 kilometers per hour within China's railway network, connecting 125 cities across the country. The service reaches 227 cities in 25 European countries and more than 100 cities in 11 Asian countries, covering nearly the entire Eurasian continent and building a new platform for economic and trade cooperation along the routes.