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The "Belt and Road" scheme is well known. The first container freight train from Yiwu, China to Barking, England, arrived January 15, 2017. Coast to coast travel time: two weeks.[1] Conveniently, China uses a 4' 8.5" track gauge, unlike Russian metric gauge, so they can move freight cars all the way without a gauge change.

Soon, of course, heavier rails, longer trains, faster trains, more trains, better gradients, more electrification, alternate routes... China is funding high speed rail from Belgrade to Budapest. Now that's an infrastructure scheme.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38654176

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With that timetable,compared to sea shipping we're talking about 3-5x faster time, but the cost will be about double - $8K-10K/container. But of course that saves money in warehousing and financing. So financially, today it makes sense for the more expensive goods, at $1.5M per container. And it's best because there's not a lot of capacity vs sea routes.

But i wonder: could those prices, with more/better trains etc, become close to sea shipping, such that aliexpress, which is extremely cheap but uses very slow sea shipping, start using rail ?

Because at those timelines, even if using a local fulfillment center, the storage period is very short, so the cost becomes quite low, and without lots of trouble, suddenly aliexpress can offer much cheaper goods than Amazon, all across Europe, with fast shipping. Heck, they may not even need to build warehouses, using uber like warehouse model(i.e. flexe).

> But i wonder: could those prices, with more/better trains etc, become close to sea shipping, such that aliexpress, which is extremely cheap but uses very slow sea shipping, start using rail ?

Absolutely! China's labor costs are not the cheapest anymore, but their tight infrastructure saves more than enough money to keep over-all production costs extremely competitive. This is simply a continuation of their economic strategy.

However, I doubt Europe will let Aliexpress dominate... China will be required to let other companies purchase and ship out of China as well.

Even if this only makes the e-commerce battle balanced, that's a big win for Aliexpress, after all the Amazon investment.

But I suspect China will find a way.Maybe it would just be as simple as cheaper costs in the Asian part. Maybe it will be nudging Chinese companies to be "patriotic" now that it doesn't cost them more. If there's a will, there's a way.

Container ships are about 2.5 times as fuel efficient as trains. I'm not sure what percentage of total cost that is, but I imagine it is significant.

The distance is bound to be smaller and offset some of that, no?

Trains can also run on electricity. Ships are far away from that.

Ships are also incredibly unregulated on the type of fuel they use and their emissions, which, while bad for the environment, lowers the cost significantly.

> aliexpress, which is extremely cheap but uses very slow sea shipping

This depends on the destination country. Recently the dutch postal service has entered some sort of agreement with aliexpress, all my stuff is here within a week nowadays.

To add to that, the SCMP newspaper just released a visual a couple days ago explaining various projects.

The five main projects of the Belt and Road Initiative http://multimedia.scmp.com/news/china/article/One-Belt-One-R...

This is a very vice visual - thank you for that.

What an absolutely amazing project! The interactive explanation is pretty slick as well.

"The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading." Can't see it -- blocked in mainland China.

SCMP is blocked? I thought SCMP had been bought by a pro-mainland owner and was now taking pro-mainland government positions.

Yeah, but they still have some editorial freedom. Their reporting skews pro-mainland but there are quite a few anti-mainland articles as well.

I just love how everything about China is huge! The three gorges dam, the grand canal, the great firewall and the great wall, the nation itself, and now this. Befits a nation whose founding myth itself is centered on an engineering project.

According to the articles below, they still have to switch to Russian gauge when entering Kazakhstan and back when entering Poland.

the "belt and road" is a nothing burger.

"The Chinese government had hoped to assemble a weightier guest list to Mr Xi’s premier international forum, which is occurring just months before he formally begins a second five-year term in office. But many heads of state and government, especially from G7 and OECD nations, were reluctant to participate in what they thought might be little more than a propaganda coup for China’s ruling Communist party.

Only seven EU heads of state or government, most from smaller eastern European countries, accepted Mr Xi’s invitation, while Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta will be the only top-level African VIP."

https://www.ft.com/content/f89060ac-36c7-11e7-bce4-9023f8c0f...

Sadly this article seems to be locked behind a paywall.

According to thablackbull's link, gauge changes take place in Khorgos between China and Kazakhstan and at the Belarus-Poland border. Much of the journey is through the former Soviet Union.

Sorry, I should have realized the route went through gauge changes, even though both ends are the same gauge. That's a pain. It's a routine operation, but a big one.

Not sure what they do about loading gauge. The UK has many limited loading gauge lines, due to old tunnels and bridges. No way will a double stack container train fit in the UK. Here's a brief world loading gauge summary.[1] The leftmost outline is the general UK limit; some lines have more clearance, especially the ones that connect to Eurotunnel. The next one is the general EU limit, small by world standards. Note the round top. AAR Plate B is the basic US limit; any Plate B boxcar can go on any US mainline track. 95% of US track accepts AAR Plate C, the "hi-cube" boxcar. AAR Plate H, 20' 3" high [2] is for double-stack container cars. Union Pacific and BNSF have upgraded to that level.

China and Russia go in for big loading gauges like the US, being big countries with long distances to cross. Watch for China lobbying the EU to upgrade for heavier freight.

[1] http://emdx.org/rail/Gabarit/ComparaisonGabaritsEuropenEtAAR... [2] http://www.icrr.net/plates.htm

The train goes to a yard off High Speed One (built to the standard European UIC GC gauge) rather than anywhere on the domestic network. It won't be double-stacked anyway, as the structure gauge through Europe is too small for that to be possible. It'll be single-stacked 9'6" boxes on standard wagons.

"Conveniently, China uses a 4' 8.5" track gauge, unlike Russian metric gauge, so they can move freight cars all the way without a gauge change."

Aeh, when was the last time you looked at a world map? You realize that the trains all have to go through Russia?

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