Shipping freight by railways between Europe, Russia and Asia has a significant transport potential. However, only 1% of this potential is exploited at present, says the International Rail Transport Committee (CIT).
Long-distance transport using the common CIM/SMGS consignment note is more and more attractive, especially due to the reduced time spent in traffic and environment protection reasons, as well as the contractual responsibility for the shipped cargo.
CIT data show that the common CIM/SMGS consignment note is used for more than fifty traffic flows over four TEN corridors, three quarters of this traffic consists of containers, at less than 5% single wagonload traffic plays a minor role. The use of the common CIM/SMGS consignment note leads to a saving of some forty mi-nutes per wagon or eight to ten hours in the total transit time of a train. Discontinuing the transcription of CIM and SMGS consignment notes provides a saving of some EUR 40 per consignment.
Within the project to make the CIM and SMGS consignment notes legally intero-perable, the International Rail Transport Committee (CIT) and the Organisation for Cooperation of Railways (OSJD) are accordingly working as fast as they can on the implementation of a comprehensive contractual framework to allow these new traffics to be moved simply in administrative terms but with complete legal certainty. The CIT and OSJD are coordinating their work closely with UNECE.
At the beginning of the year, the Working Group of the CIT and OSJD met and the members of the two organizations have presented new information on the uniform application of CIM/SMGS. Therefore, the statistical data presented by Russian Railways and Ukrainian Railways and published by CIT show that the use of CIM/SMGS has tripled, so the growing tendency continued in 2012. As regards its use in railway operations, according to the information provided by RZD, around 28,000 CIM/SMGS consignment notes were used in the first 10 months of last year.
DB Schenker Rail Germany announced that it will analyse in 2013 together with Belarus Railways and Russian Railways the possibility to introduce CIM/SMGS as part of the Trans Eurasia Logistic (TEL) project for the cargo shipped to Kunzevo II.
It is also important to mention that Russian Railways Logistics together with its subsidiary YuXinOu (Chongqing) Logistics launched the first container train between China and Europe that uses the common CIM/SMGS consignment note in October 2012.
According to the data for 2012 supplied by CIT and OSJD members and published on the web site of CIT, the use of CIM/SMGS consignment note exceeds the 85% share for railway container transport and amounts to over 18% for single wagon loads.
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