“Carrying more than 40,000 containers, DB moved the biggest freight volume on the world’s longest railway. This is a good basis to increase the number of containers to approximately 100,000 by 2020, thus tripling the figure compared to 2014”, says Ronald Pofalla, Member of the Management Board for Economic, Legal and Regulatory Affairs Deutsche Bahn.
The trips on the 10,000 to 12,000-kilometer routes usually take between twelve and 16 days, including several transhipments of containers to different gauges. This means the services provided by DB together with the railway companies in Poland, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China take half the time of the transport by ship.
The services are mainly used by customers shipping time-sensitive goods such as promotional goods for the clothing industry, or capital-intensive goods such as automobile parts and electronics. On behalf of the BMW Group, DB together with its partner railways are supplying the automotive plant in Shenyang with vehicle parts from Leipzig and Regensburg since 2011.