Chinese city sees 15,000th Central Asia freight train trip

NANJING -- The coastal city of Lianyungang in East China's Jiangsu province has reported 15,000 freight train trips to and from the five Central Asian countries.

A cargo train, fully loaded with 100 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers of ceramic tiles, tires and grease processing equipment, left Lianyungang for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan on Thursday.

This marked the 15,000th Lianyungang-Central Asian countries freight train trip since December 1992 when the New Eurasian Land Bridge opened, according to Jiangsu International Rail Freight Express Co Ltd.

Lianyungang is the eastern terminal of the 10,900-km-long New Eurasian Land Bridge, an international passageway linking the Pacific and the Atlantic. The passageway runs from China's coastal cities of Lianyungang and Rizhao to Rotterdam of the Netherlands and Belgium's Antwerp, passing through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany. It serves more than 30 countries and regions.

The city has taken a series of measures in recent years to raise the efficiency of customs clearance to facilitate the cross-border freight train service.

The freight train service between Lianyungang and Central Asia is the epitome of booming China-Europe freight train services nationwide.

In the first quarter of this year, the number of China-Europe freight train services surged by 15 percent year-on-year to 4,186 trips, according to the China State Railway Group Co Ltd.