Due to COVID-19 epidemic and container deficit, railroad delivery became the main type of transport within and outside the countries. During the pandemic, China used railroad cars round the clock to deliver medical supplies to provinces; when the lockdown was over, the cars were used to quickly return plants, factories, and trade organizations back to work.
The crisis destroyed multimodal schemes existing in the world. That is why logistics companies had to adapt to retailers’ needs and change road cargo transportation to rail. According to Russian Railways (RR), during the first 6 months of 2021 the company transported 1.5 times greater number of containers as compared to the same period in 2020 and 2.5 times as compared to previous years. Despite the growth of fees by 15-25%, no decline is observed in demand for rail transportation.
Owing to a heavy workload of the Trans-Siberian Railway, RR decided to launch several new train routes from China to Europe via Kazakhstan and Kaliningrad: Chongqing – Friedrichshafen to Germany and Xian – Immingham to the UK. For 9 months of 2021, over 3000 trains headed for EU countries passed through the Zabaikalsk-Manchzhuria entry point situated on the border with the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia.
However, RR capacities on transporting large amounts of cargo due to the failure of traditional logistics chains are still insufficient to solve all problems. A great accumulation of containers is observed in South Korea. Congestion at the port of Busan due to restrictions constantly imposed in China is about 95%.
Railroad companies successfully meet the challenges with increased demand for services. However, disruptions in the global logistics and sea transport collapse still do not allow market analysts to give optimistic forecasts.