Freight turnover between China and the Russian Federation is constantly growing, as the countries are actively developing trade.
However, transportation via railways faces a problem: «bottlenecks» on the BAM and Transsib.
How can you send a train from Russia to China today?
There are few options:
-Via Kazakhstan or Mongolia.
In these cases, you will have to pay for the use of the railways of these countries.
-Via BAM and Transsib.
Free, but long: the train will have to go for at least a week.
Is there a direct route to China?
The management of Russian Railways is already thinking about opening a window to China on the western section of the border (from Altai).
But it seems that you will have to cut it in the literal sense, and not something, but rocks: the border runs in the mountains.
Theoretically, if both countries start building railways and connect them in Altai, then transportation will become many times faster and cheaper, and the throughput will increase significantly.
But there are a number of problems:
— Chopping rocks or building overpasses is an extremely expensive pleasure.
— There are almost no railways in Altai itself. Taking them there is an additional large expense.
— From the Chinese side, the Ukok nature reserve approaches directly to the place of the proposed railway, where you cannot build or cut anything.
Currently, negotiations and discussions are still underway about what is cheaper to build: mountain overpasses or foothill tunnels for trains.
In the second case, each country (both Russia and China) will have to conduct 20 km of underground communications.
But so far it is far from the end of these disputes, and even before the implementation of projects in life — and even more so.
In the meantime, Russian Railways notes that due to the very «bottlenecks» the freight turnover between the countries is falling today: in March it decreased by 15.8%, in early April by another 18.9%.
Instead of 22 trains, only 13 depart daily.
And it seems that it will not work to come up with a quick and cheap way out of the situation.
