China, Russia plan fifth rail link to keep trade chugging along in harsh winter months
Heilongjiang province is studying feasibility of connecting Heihe city with Blagoveshchensk in Russia by train, aiming to remove road and waterway bottlenecks
Plans for a fifth cross-border railway linking China and Russia are taking shape as regional officials move to further cement trade and broader collaboration while geopolitical volatility pushes the two countries closer together.
Last week, the government of the northernmost province bordering Russia – Heilongjiang – issued a tender notice for the feasibility study and preliminary design of a new cross-border railway.
The line aims to connect the Chinese city of Heihe with Blagoveshchensk, the administrative centre of Russia’s Amur Oblast region.
The proposed project would serve as the fifth China-Russia rail corridor, joining existing border crossings at Manzhouli in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region; Suifenhe and Tongjiang in Heilongjiang; and Hunchun in Jilin province.
More significantly, the new link will cut through the Heilong (Amur) River, which forms part of the international boundary, and extend its reach to Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway, aiming to overcome bottlenecks in all-weather road-rail intermodal transport, according to the tender notice.
Currently, trade and passenger flows between Heihe and Blagoveshchensk rely on a tolled road bridge and a narrow stretch of waterway, whose shipping capacity is constrained in harsh winter months.