Most governments, both in Europe and in the Central-Asian Platform, are now trying to encourage the development of the railway freight transport, mainly due to its low polluting impact and lower transport costs. However, one can only admit that the main disadvantage of this transport mode is the lack of flexibility, but also the presence of physical and non-physical aspects have hindered the railway freight traffic in international transports.
Specialists in the field estimate that any new freight traffic across Asia will be diverted away from maritime shipping and the level of diverted traffic will highly depend on the net benefits to freight customers offered by the railways over sea carriers. The Trans-Asian Railway (TAR) is one of the most representative initiatives for the revival of the Silk Road, set up for boosting operational efficiency, economic relevance and commercial use of the railway transport infrastructure in Asia. The created network is aimed at setting a link between Singapore and Istanbul, offering the possibility to continue railway connections to Europe and Africa.
To illustrate the development potential of the Network as the backbone of container transport, ESCAP promoted, with the support of OSJD, a number of test transports in container block trains along different routes on the northern corridor of the network; this corridor links Europe and the Pacific via Germany, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, as well as Northern and Southern Korea. The costs for the development of all infrastructure projects on the TAR network are estimated by ESCAP specialists to reach yearly USD 224 Billion for the next 10 years.
The Trans-Asian Network could link Europe through a so-called south corridor via a railway tunnel underneath the Bosporus Strait in Turkey, which is currently under construction, and via the existing railways across several Asian countries to China’s east coast.
However, by creating routes that are dedicated to the railway freight transport on the Eurasian platform, the players in the field intend to remove barriers, at least at the administrative level, by emphasising the advantages of long-distance railway routes compared to maritime routes.
New political strategies aim at a Eurasian platform more and more connected by railway freight transport. Therefore, either we are talking about the Trans-Siberian Network, the Trans-Asian Network, the North-South Corridor (Russia-Iran and then to India), the new (Iron) Silk Road or the recently launched freight routes from Germany to Russia and China, these are only few of the attempts to revive and, at the same time, strengthen the position of long-distance railway freight transport for the purpose of underlying its advantages compared to maritime transport in terms of a much more reduced travel time. Once completed, the North-South Corridor will be another example to support long-distance railway routes as it will significantly reduce the freight transport time currently spent on the sea from 45-60 days to 25-30 days.
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