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First freight train from China arrives in France

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eisenach

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There's an interesting item on the French 13.00 news today (France 2). The first train including 8 wagons from China arrived in Lyon this morning. They hope to have up to 3 trains a week soon, each returning with French good for export to China.
The link to today's news isn't up yet, but you'll be able to navigate from here:
http://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-jt/france-2/13-heures/

It was around 10 minutes into the bulletin at 13h, today, Thursday 21st April.
 
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hulabaloo

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Amazing journey - how many countries does that go through?

I assume the operator would have to hire a driver (or three) for every country it passes through for their route knowledge?
 

GrimsbyPacer

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This needs to become more common, the 15 largest ships are more polluting than all the cars on Earth. Trains are a much better way of transporting heavy loads, faster too.
 

HSTEd

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A container ship might be far more polluting than a train, but the container ship carries orders of magnitude more cargo.

Does your train move 18340 TEU in a single jump?
You can reduce the pollution of the container ships by using lower sulfur fuel, but baring continuous nuclear/hydro electrification all the way to China (which I doubt) you won't get close on carbon emissions.
 
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STEVIEBOY1

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I wonder how many days that took and what route it used. Would there have been change of gauge,bogies too?
 

endecotp

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My guess is that the containers were moved onto different wagons for the guage changes, rather than changing the bogies or axles, but I've not found any definitive info about that.

There was a similar first train from China to Spain last year.
 

Bald Rick

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This needs to become more common, the 15 largest ships are more polluting than all the cars on Earth. Trains are a much better way of transporting heavy loads, faster too.

Think we might need to see your working on that one.
 

fowler9

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My guess is that the containers were moved onto different wagons for the guage changes, rather than changing the bogies or axles, but I've not found any definitive info about that.

There was a similar first train from China to Spain last year.

Surely the first one from China to Spain would have had to go through France?
 

Gordon

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I agree about the containers being swapped in various places, thus I think the safest way to describe these movements is as 'a through service' rather than 'a through train' ; there is a subtle linguistic difference between the two.
 
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