THE FIRST container train from China to the UK left Yiwu in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, south east of Shanghai on 1 January (‘Europeview’, last month). It arrived to a VIP welcome, including Chinese lion dancers and TV crews from around the world, at DB’s London Eurohub terminal in Barking (the old Ripple Lane motive power depot site) on schedule on 18 January. As the Eurohub site is not electrified, the arriving train headed by No 92015 was propelled into the site by diesel loco No 66136. Both locos were exceptionally clean and had ‘Yiwu-London’ vinyls.
The train was operated by the InterRail Group, a multinational transport operator based in Switzerland, on behalf of Chinese Railways subsidiary CRIMT (China Railway International Multimodal Transport). The train was loaded with 34 containers (68 twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEUs) containing consumer goods and clothing from wholesale suppliers in the Yiwu area. Yiwu is the location of China’s (and the world’s) largest wholesale markets, with over 70,000 companies operating in the city. As a result, Yiwu is now the leading city with international rail freight connections in China, with eight regular container train services to Europ…
