Earlier this month, the new Chuanshan freight rail terminal has officially been inaugurated at Ningbo-Zhoushan. The development of this new intermodal facility is part of a wider program that has since linked two international container terminals at Chinas second-largest box port to the Chinese railway network.
The Chuanshan freight rail terminal was built as an extension to the Ningbo Beilun Container Terminal 4 (NBCT-4), located in the ports east. It was jointly developed and jointly funded by the China Railway Group (CREC) and the Ningbo Municipal Government. Of note, a subsection of NBCT-4 is operated as a joint-venture of Ningbo Port and TIL, a sister company of MSC, under the name Ningbo Gangji Terminal. The entire facility, including Gangji, offers a berth length of some 3,700 m with an estimated design capacity of around 9.00 Mteu annually. As such, it is one of the largest container terminals in the world. Due to the rocky and mountainous landscape that surrounds the port of Ningbo, construction of the railway to the Chuanshan terminal was a major undertaking. A new 21 km branch line was needed to connect the facility to an existing rail corridor. This included several large bridges and numerous tunnels, the longest of which measures about 7 km.
Chuanshan is the second rail project to complete at the port of Ningbo-Zhoushan. A first freight rail link to Ningbos international container terminals was inaugurated in 2017, when the Ningbo Beilun Container Terminal 2 (NBCT-2, aka NPCT, with Hutchison Group as a 49% shareholder) was connected to the rail network.
Last year, Ningbo-Zhoushan port handled 21.99 Mteu and it recorded just over 800,000 teu of rail cargo volume.
