17 Сентября 2014

From:	John Keir, Ross Learmont Ltd
Email:	 john.keir@telia.com 
Date:	17 September 2014

Entschuldigen Sie, ist das der Sonderzug nach Peking?
(With apologies to Udo Lindenberg)

DB Logistik has just inaugurated a new container service from Hamburg to Zhengzhou in the Chinese province of Henan. The 41 container special block train is scheduled to take 17 days to cover the 10,214 km from the Hansestadt to the Middle Kingdon. The German lyricist, Udo Lindenberg had been content to send his `Sonderzug‘ only as far as Pankow to visit the General Secretary of the DDR Communist Party but German Railways have decided to go one step further and are despatching a full container train to the ‘Genossen‘ in the Central Committee in China. The communique from DB goes on to advise that the train will complete the journey in 17 days. Or, to be precise, the communique reads ´in rund 17 Tagen und ist damit über 20 Tage schneller am Ziel als das Schiff‘ ( i.e. `in about 17 days.´).

As with all the train services between Europe and China, the selling point is speed. The train is faster (´schneller`is the word DB uses) than those slow lumbering container vessels. Let us investigate this claim further: 10,214 km divided by 17 days and then divided again by 24 hours = an average speed of 25.03 km per hour. Convert that to knots and we arrive at a figure of just under 13.5 knots. A pitiful thirteen and a half knots for this Schnellzug – that can’t possibly be correct! Even Maersk’s Triple E vessels bob along at an average 19 knots, while some of the medium-sized container vessels serenely cross the world‘s oceans at an average of 23 knots. The container vessels go the long way round, call at several ports in between but, of course, carry many, many more teu than the Sonderzug – up to 18,000 teu more.

‘Ah‘, I hear you say,`the train takes only 17 days‘. Unlike container vessels, the train operators do not offer a daily service from Hamburg to China, so if you miss the Sonderzug, you may have to wait quite some time for the next departure. Also, as Russian experts point out, transcontiental container trains can be held up for various reasons resulting in a delay of several days. You may have paid top dollar for an express service only to find out that it takes a lot longer than scheduled.

This summer, the New Silk Road train service commenced services from Chongqing, China to Poland and Germany. On the outbound leg, the train transports computers and on the backhaul to central China, it delivers electronic products, auto parts and steel products. The 11,178 km journey goes via Urumqi, Russia, Poland and ends up 16 days later in Duisburg, averaging the equivalent of 16 knots.

On a more positive note, the port of Duisburg, which already operates several block trains to and from China, predicts that total container throughput in 2014 will exceed 3 million teu. That would elevate Duisburg to the world’s largest inland container port – a veritable cause for celebration. With a complex rail network, direct access to the Rive Rhine and situated at the heart of a giant web of motorway links to the whole of Europe, Duisburg is quickly turning itself into the centre par excellence for intermodal traffic in Western Europe.

Thanks to generous funding from the European Union, the rail network is about to extend itself further East. The EU is inviting member states to submit plans on nine major transport corridors. The EU plans to invest Euro 11.9 Billion on the TENT-T core network that will provide the backbone of the Union’s rail network. A particular aim of this round of funding is to improve east-west links, which have been somewhat neglected over the last 20 years. Already this year, the new standard-gauge line from Poland will reach the EU-funded container terminal in Kaunas. The line will then head north to the Latvian capital, Riga. There, DB Schenker and RZD are opening their new container terminal in the eastern part of the city close to the main rail line and highway to Moscow.

Meanwhile, RZD announced that it is not in a position to provide additional container block-train services on the route between St Petersburg and Moscow. Currently, two daily block trains transport boxes between the Northern Capital and Moscow, sandwiched between the regular high-speed passenger trains, which share the same track. In the first eight months of this year, Russian container ports handled 3.56 million teu. This represents a meagre 0.7% increase on last year’s total. Although the number of laden containers rose by 21.9% to 616,000 teu, the volume of empty containers remained stubbornly high at 943,000 teu.

While some may consider empty containers to be an unfortunate by-product of modern transportation, the chemical industry views this as a great opportunity to switch from conventional to intermodal transport. Those 943,000 empty teu represent a potential transport resource capable of moving over 11 million tons of chemical products. Although the actual volume of cargo that could be loaded into the empty units is much lower, the potential cargo flows can be measured in millions and not merely in thousands of tons. From the chemical producers’ point of view, the empty container stocks are considered a quick and simple means of gaining entry into a rapidly expanding segment of the global fertiliser industry.

John Keir, Ross Learmont Ltd.
17 September 2014

Copyright ©, 2014, John Keir