Eurasian rail freight corridor alliance The United Transport and Logistics Company (UTLC), has moved to strengthen the future of Europe-China freight transports by forging a new deal with a group of multimodal operators.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) brings together JSC Russian Railways, the National Union Belarusian Railway and Kazakhstan Temir Zholy with SNCF Logistics’ multimodal arm, Forwardis. The agreement was signed in Paris by Alexey Grom, CEO of UTLC, and Edouard Laverny, General Director of Forwardis’ Rail Freight and Multimodal Transportation unit.

Impetus

The stakeholders will cooperate in the field of intermodal transportation between Europe and China, by offering their clients a competitive range of services. This agreement rubber-stamps an important partnership between Russian Railways Group (RZD Group) and French National Railways Group (SNCF), and, from a broader perspective, gives further impetus to the development of Eurasian freight corridors.

Under the terms of the MoU, UTLC will provide its services between Dostyk (Kazakhstan) and Brest (Belarus), along the 1520 mm gauge rail network, while Forwardis will be in charge of the operations within the European Union. The collaboration provides a formal and extremely valuable platform for the exchange of information in the logistics and trade sectors, and paves the way for further developments regarding container train services on the Eurasian network.

Growth

UTLC has already recorded a year-on-year growth of 84 per cent of rail freight volumes on the Brest-Altynkol corridor in the first nine months of 2017. It carried some 118,500 TEUs between January and September, while volumes for the whole of 2016 were 64,400 TEU.