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China Railway Corporation (CR) has begun calling for bids in two public tenders for 35,000 open-topped wagons for transportation of goods including coal, according to a notice by its subsidiary China Railway Investment on May 10. The rail giant’s tenders are viewed as another big outlay soon after CR purchased thousands of wagons last year in accordance with the central government’s “road-to-railway” policy, market sources commented.
According to the notice, CR will buy 32,000 C70E type wagons for general bulk freight and another 3,000 C80B type stainless steel wagons exclusively for coal transportation. However, when the new rolling stock might be introduced and on which lines, CR has not said. The tenders are open during May 13-17, with the winners announced probably in a month’s time, Mysteel notes.
The C80B type stainless steel wagons can haul 80 tonnes and are designed for use on the special coal trains now plying several routes from mining region to port and which have a total haul capacity of 20,000 tonnes per train. The wagons are engineered to synchronize with coal unloading facilities at the third- and fourth-phase coal terminals at Qinhuangdao port, introduced by a state-owned carriage builder, CRRC Taiyuan.
Qinhuangdao port in North China’s Hebei, served by the crucial Datong-Qinhuangdao rail line, is the country’s largest port for domestic coal shipments from North to East and South China, Mysteel Global notes.
On the other hand, the C70E wagons that the state-owned rail operator wants incorporate mostly carbon steel in their manufacture and are used to haul up to 70 tonnes of mineral ore, coal, steel, machinery and wood.
“The tender is a clear signal that China Railway is actively preparing for the country’s ‘road-to-rail’ shift project, which could help increase railway transportation capacity and reduce the country’s heavy reliance on truck transportation,” commented a Shanghai-based analyst.
Besides the projects to enlarge the carrying capacities of existing railway lines, the government is progressing new rail freight projects such as Menghua Railway connecting North China’s Inner Mongolia and Jiangxi in East China, which will commission in October and whose capacity will reach 200 million tonnes/year as of 2020, as reported.
Prior to the tenders announced last Friday, CR had opened four tenders in 2018 for the procurement of a total of 45,000 C70E carriages and 12,600 C80B wagons, calculated based on the corporation’s tender notices.
Last October, China’s State Council announced a three-year plan to adjust the country’s transportation structure over 2018-2020, predicting that the volume of goods transported by the country’s railways will increase by 30% or 1.1 billion tonnes by 2020 from that in 2017. Moreover, the railways will prioritize the transportation of commodities including coal, coke, mineral ore and grain.
As the operator of most of China’s railway lines, CR has also released a three-year plan for 2018-2020, noting that rail is set to transport 4.79 billion tonnes of goods by next year. It hopes that over 90% of China’s commodities will be transported by rail as of 2020, among which coal transportation will reach 2.81 billion tonnes. This would be equivalent to 75% of China’s coal output in 2018 and 650 million tonnes higher from that in 2017, according to a report by Xinhua News Agency. |
