Xiamen speeds up rail-sea combined transport development

The coastal city of Xiamen in East China's Fujian province has ramped up efforts to promote the coordinated development of road-rail, sea-rail and other multimodal forms of transport to restructure the transportation network since 2019, according to a local news report on March 31.

Over the past few years, the city has opened a number of rail routes connecting other inland Chinese provinces, such as the Xiamen-Ganzhou Railway and Xiamen-Nanchang Railway, which have significantly reduced the time and cost of transporting goods between the city and other inland areas.

According to official statistics, the container throughput of Xiamen Port exceeded 11.4 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in 2020, while the number of standard containers carried by rail-sea combined transport was 51,500 TEUs, growing by more than 40 percent over the same period of last year, bucking the trend of a global slowdown during challenging times.

Jiang Xiaobao, vice-president of a logistics company in Xiamen, spoke highly of the new transport model developed by the city.

Jiang's company deals with wood imports from Thailand, which are used for manufacturing high-end furniture. Jiang said that it took 12 days to transport wood from Thailand to Jiangxi's Ganzhou city before, which was costly and time consuming, but thanks to rail-sea combined transport, the travel time has been reduced to seven days, and each container is 3,000 yuan ($458.22) cheaper. Jiang said that the combined transport model improves transportation efficiency and reduces logistics costs for enterprises.