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posted by janrinok on Tuesday May 15 2018, @03:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the chew-chew dept.

[A] Freight train service from Bayannur city in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to Tehran, Iran's capital, was launched Thursday morning.

The train, carrying 1,150 tonnes of sunflower seeds, will travel 8,352 kilometers through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, arriving in Tehran in 15 days, said Chen Bo, deputy manager of the Hohhot office of China Railway.

The new train route will shorten transportation time by at least 20 days compared with ocean shipping.

(source)


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday May 15 2018, @01:01PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 15 2018, @01:01PM (#680025)

    Chinese crews wouldn't be familiar with the track and signals in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and those countries' engineers probably wouldn't be familiar with the Chinese engines.

    Rail is kinda a nightmare of century old legacy and competing companies and countries and divisions, so you might be surprised, someone who's still being tested on 1930s signals because there's exactly one remaining in some rural siding would be pretty chill with learning a little Chinese stuff, at least enough to make it to the next CCP.

    In the old days, crews slept in the caboose on week long shifts but the standard, perhaps worldwide, is having crew change points along side the track about every seven hours or so. In theory a perfect run with no unexpected passing stops and no track restrictions and no weather or equipment problems takes seven hours, reality likely to be a bit more, most of the time, and there's briefing and inspection time so it would be unusual for a crew to work less than an 8 hour day. Things get whacky with the government and corporate rules once 12 hours in service is exceeded, naturally that only happens when there's an emergency already making things whacky. Also, the rules changed a lot over the last century or two.

    The level of "wink and nod" immigration and corporate policy has generally declined over the decades, but AFAIK they haven't gone to the extreme yet of making a train crew go thru customs with the vacation people. CCPs were usually pretty close to the border certainly less than 100 miles on either side. I'm the first in my family in many generations not to work for the railroad in some capacity, a couple hundred miles south of the Canadian border it was truly a rare and unusual noteworthy event to meet a Canadian train crew although it happened a couple of times in my youth and was considered something of a wonder and when news of a Canadian sighting spread thru the office as kids we'd get dragged out to the yard to see a genuine Canadian far out of their normal territory. I guess in the old days immigration had a file on each canadian train crewman to pre-approve them and dispatch FAXed a list of border crossers daily to immigration and that was the entire process of canadian train crews hopping the border temporarily. On the theory that they're driving a freakin' train there's no point in personally searching or harassing the crew because they could simply put tons of weed in the box cars if they wanted, or whatever. No passports required, no visa, nothing, just a name on a list from corporate HQ. Of course that was the old days and I haven't seen a box car lately and I'm sure there's infinitely more highly profitable security theater.

    Its similar to aviation where they don't make the pilot land on each border they cross for inspection and trading for local pilots. Its maybe even more similar to maritime shipping where if you're just sailing on past, you merely sail on past, but if you're getting up close and personal with the locals a harbor pilot takes the ship over to guide you thru the treacherous harbor and smooth over the paperwork.

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