Northern East West Freight Corridor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Northern East West Freight Corridor , usually referred to as the N.E.W. Corridor is a project organized by the UIC and [1] [2]. The Northern Alternative is an east-west transport route connecting the east coast of United States to East Asia by train and ship.
Contents |
[edit] Route
The plan calls for two main routes that will serve different areas of East Asia. Both routes start from East Coast Ports of North America (Halifax Harbour) across the Atlantic Ocean to the port of Narvik, from there with rail trough Sweden to Finland and Russia. From Russia there is two routes: one route follows the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vostochny Port. The other route goes though Kazakhstan to the train hub in Ürümqi in mainland China. From Ürümqi the route goes to Lanzhou and possibly the port city Lianyungang
[edit] Current status
The Project is financed for a test run through NEW Corridor AS, a company owned 65% by UIC and 35% by a Norwegian county Nordland.
[edit] Benefits
Transportutvikling claims in their report[3] that this corridor will be a important alternative to the traditional shipping route from China to the U.S.A. The main reasons they state are:
- Shorter route for some destinations. The route seems longer on a traditional map, but on a globe it is easy to see that it's shorter than alternatives through central Europe.
- Reduced transit time, because of faster land transport and shorter travel distance.
- The route does not have the congestion problem of the densely populated areas of coastal China and constrained ports of west coast USA. Because the corridors route goes through sparsely populated areas, it is relatively easy and cheap to increase capacity.
- Most of the infrastructure is already there. The main need is expanding ports and making train shifts at borders more efficient.
- The port of Narvik in Northern Norway already has an all-year ice-free port and railway connection to Russia through Sweden and Finland.
- This route avoids the 6 bottlenecks of global shipping; the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Bosporus, the Straits of Hormuz and the Straits of Malacca, which 60% of all shipping passes through.
- It is a backup solution in case of terror or traffic incidents, conflict in South China Ocean or labour strikes on the Pacific shipping route. The west coast port strike [4] showed important and crucial ports are for the U.S. economy.
[edit] Problems
[edit] Technical
Major issues with the corridor are technical, financial and political. The technical issues are:
- The rail gauge of the tracks differs. Russia, Kazakhstan and Finland use a broader gauge (1 520/ 1 524 mm), while China, Sweden and Norway uses the narrower standard gauge (1 425 mm). This adds overhead at border crossings. This effect can arguably be decreased with efficiency and investments.
- Increasing train speeds. The Trans-Siberian Railway is currently increasing service speed to 55 km/h. The route would have to reduce time on track and when changing tracks.
- Increasing the limited port capacity in Narvik for China-US trade.
- Reducing round trip time for the customers by increasing speed and frequency. This requires a high volume of goods.
- Railway capacity. There is probably not capacity for 45 more trains per day along the Nordic single track railways. Sweden is currently upgrading the railway near the Finnish border which is in a bad state.
[edit] Political
The political issues are more severe than the technical:
- The bureaucratic procedures at border crossings is long, inefficient and problematic. Several days of the journey is inefficiently used at borders.
- The border crossing of Kazakhstan need more negotiating.
- Even though Russia is stable, it is on the 121 place in Index of Economic Freedom, while China and Kasakhstan is in 111 and 113 respectively. NEWs defenders says that the corridor has lower risk than the alternatives, and regardless reduces risk by increasing the alternatives.
- Railway track is vulnerable in a way ocean shipping routes isn't. A train crash, railway sabotage or terrorism can stop all transport for weeks. The Trans-Siberian Railway by its very length is hard to protect.
[edit] Financial
The most crucial issues are though financial issues. For this route to be possible the frequency of departure to be above a minimum rate. Chinese ports handled 48 million TEUs in 2003 (an increased of 29,7% from 2002). "The Midwest of China did in 2002 export more than 130,000 TEUs to Europe and close to 200,000 to USA. If only 50% of this volume could be carried out by train it will represent approximately 4 daily trains along the N.E.W. Corridor", according to Mr. Xiao, Managing Director of Sinotrans (June 29, 2003, Helsinki). There has to be ships leaving Narvik every day for acceptable frequency, if the ship is 5,000 TEU (a mid size transport ship) there has to be a yearly transport of 1.8 million TEUs (or about 45 trains a day).
[edit] Start up issues
There is also the problem financing the start up faze of the corridor. The Chinese, Russian, Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian bureaucracy has to approve plans, improve routines and train customs officers. There is need for infrastructure improvement. And finally there have to be enough trains to run at several times a day on a rail journey taking up to 14-28 days for a train round trip. 45 trains every day on a two week round trip adds up to about 630 trains.
[edit] Competitive routes
Apart from shipping all the way between USA and China, other ship/train routes than over Narvik is possible. Reloading could be done in Murmansk or in a port in the Baltic Sea, avoiding the break-of-gauge at the Swedish-Finnish border, and having less number of countries involved.
