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Throughout the 2000s, various different China-Europe rail routes were being beta tested in starts in stops, but it wasn’t until 2012 that the logistics crew at HP worked out the bugs and began offering regular weekly service between Chongqing to Duisburg, Germany.

A year later, Chinese President Xi Jinping would announce a new policy called One Belt, One Road (later changed to the Belt and Road) that would shake up the geopolitical and geo-economic layout of Eurasia and re-establish China’s place in it. The plan called for pumping the New Silk Road — the long-emerging network of trade routes, logistics hubs, and economic zones stretching between China and Europe — with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of momentum. This new policy proved to be a boon for trans-Eurasian rail transport, as these new rail lines would become its vanguard, establishing physical links between many of the key countries and a platform of cooperation from which to drive closer diplomatic and economic ties.

An international train at Khorgos Gateway, an emerging transshipment hub on the China-Kazakhstan border. It is places like this that are going to potentially benefit most from Beijing's efforts to consolidate this pan-Eurasia rail network. Image: Khorgos Gateway.
An international train at Khorgos Gateway, an emerging transshipment hub on the China-Kazakhstan border. It is places like this that are going to potentially benefit most from Beijing’s efforts to consolidate the emerging pan-Eurasia rail network. Image: Khorgos Gateway.

The Belt and Road soon became a major talking point of China’s central government and state-run media, and related infrastructure was posited as new drivers of growth as well as being what the bosses in Beijing wanted. Soon, cities from all over China began starting up China-Europe rail lines; each trying to position themselves as hubs on the emerging Silk Road Economic Belt. What started out as two regular routes emerging from booming high-tech zones in Chongqing and Chengdu rapidly grew into a 39 route network linking together dozens of cities in China and Europe.

In China, provinces and large cities still maintain relatively large amounts of authority to develop their own infrastructure and make investments, and most of these new trans-Eurasian trains were developed and subsidized by local municipalities without direct oversight from the central government.

A common Chinese calamity soon ensued: a feeding frenzy of development which resulted in a sector which became, as put by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), “plagued with high costs, disorderly competition and a supply-demand imbalance.”

Basically, the divided nature of the trans-Eurasian rail routes were reducing the potential of the network as a whole. Cities were setting themselves up as competitors as they vied for cargo and “Silk Road” status, and it was becoming clear that a better organizational structure was needed.

Throughout the past year it has been rumored along the stations of the Silk Road Economic Belt that China’s central government was going to step in and take more control over the emerging network of trans-Eurasian trains. The first big move towards this was creating the China Railway Express brand, which was put on display to the world back in June through distributing thousands of new shipping containers bearing its new logo. Now, more reforms are on the way:

It was formally announced last week by the NDRC that this melee of trans-Eurasian trains will be streamlined down to just three routes as part of a new five-year plan to improve the European service of China Railway Express and the China-Europe rail network as a whole.

“I think it is necessary because to me it doesn’t make any sense that these cities are competing with each other. I think that doesn’t work because it’s counterproductive,” said Ronald Kleijwegt of HP, who led the team that revived trans-Eurasian rail with the first regular China-Europe route in 2012. “So I think having this managed more centrally from the government, where these cities need to see the overall benefit for companies like us but also for their own country and their own city.”