Northern East-West Freight Corridor

The Northern East West Freight Corridor, usually referred to as the N.E.W. Corridor, is a project organized by the International Union of Railways UIC and Transportutvikling AS to connect the east coast of the United States to East Asia by rail and maritime routes.

The plan calls for two main routes. Both routes start from east coast ports of North America such as Halifax Harbour, then across the Atlantic Ocean to the port of Narvik, from there by rail, often called the Eurasian Land Bridge, through Sweden to Finland and Russia. From Russia there are two routes: either via the Trans-Siberian Railway to , or though Kazakhstan to Ürümqi in China. From Ürümqi the route goes to Lanzhou and possibly to the port city Lianyungang.

The project is financed for a test run through NEW Corridor AS, a company owned 65% by UIC and 35% by a Norwegian county, Nordland.

Transportutvikling claims in their report that this corridor will be an important alternative to the traditional shipping route from China to the U.S.A. The main reasons given are:

Major issues with the corridor are technical, financial and political. The technical issues are:

The political issues are more severe than the technical:

The most crucial issues are financial.

There is also the problem financing the start up phase of the corridor. The Chinese, Kazakh, Russian, Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian bureaucracy has to approve plans, improve routines and train customs officers. There is need for infrastructure improvement. And finally there have to be enough trains to run at several times a day on a rail journey taking up to 14–28 days for a train round trip. 45 trains every day on a two-week round trip adds up to about 630 trains.

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Wikipedia