China’s Xi’an sees increase in China-Europe freight train traffic
The Xi’an Guojigang Railway Station in Xi’an, northwest China’s Shaanxi province, is the railway station that sees the most trips made by China-Europe freight trains across China. It is designed to handle 5.4 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) and transport 66 million tons of cargo via railway each year.
Since the China-Europe freight train (Xi’an) service was launched in 2013, Xi’an has handled over 20,000 China-Europe freight trains, or about a quarter of China’s total. It operated more than 5,000 China-Europe freight trains in 2023 alone.
Today, Xi’an Guojigang Railway Station operates 18 regular international westward routes that reach Almaty in Kazakhstan, Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Hamburg in Germany and cross the Caspian Sea, covering the entire Eurasian continent and connecting Xi’an to major international trade hubs.
The station also operates scheduled rail-sea intermodal services to Qingdao, Ningbo and Lianyungang in the east, and freight services to Vietnam and Laos in the south.
Currently, Xi’an Guojigang Railway Station serves as a distribution hub for freight from more than 20 provinces across China, as 21 rail routes to Western Europe pass through it.
“Although Xi’an isn’t on the border or the coast, you can see the whole world from here,” says Li Pei, a duty manager at the station.
According to Shao Bo’er, general manager of Xi’an International Inland Port Multimodal Transportation Co., Ltd., which operates the China-Europe freight train (Xi’an) service, the company’s business volume increased by 1.5 times year-on-year in the first two months of this year.
The company has gained major domestic enterprises like Sany Heavy Industry and LiuGong as new clients, as well as multinational corporations such as Volkswagen, Shao said. Even consigners from Japan and South Korea would take Xi’an as a transfer hub for their goods to Europe, Shao added.
In July 2023, the station upgraded its service to a “2.0 version” – with two outbound and one inbound full-time schedule trains per week.
