OVERCOMING REGULATORY AND INFRASTRUCTURAL BARRIERS IN THE EURASIAN LAND-BRIDGE: A CASE STUDY OF THE CHINA-EUROPE EXPRESS RAILWAY

ABSTRACT

Background. The China-Europe Express Railway has grown from a marginal alternative to sea freight into a corridor carrying more than three million TEUs a year, yet its continued expansion is constrained less by demand than by a set of structural regulatory and infrastructural barriers inherited from the corridor's fragmented institutional history. This article examines those barriers through the lens of the Eurasian Land-Bridge as a whole, using the China-Europe Express Railway as the primary case. Methods. A qualitative case-study method is used, drawing on rail-industry data (Eurasian Rail Alliance Index, China State Railway Group releases), international rail-law literature (UNECE, OSJD, CIT), and trade-press and market-analysis reporting published between 2018 and 2026. Results. Three categories of barrier are identified. Physical-infrastructural barriers center on the break-of-gauge between China's 1435 mm standard gauge and the 1520 mm broad gauge used across the former Soviet space, requiring bogie exchange or container transshipment at every crossing; this is compounded by extreme traffic concentration, with an estimated 85–90 per cent of China-Europe trains funneled through the single Malaszewicze–Brest crossing, which briefly ceased operating altogether when Poland closed its border with Belarus in autumn 2025. Legal-regulatory barriers stem from the coexistence of two incompatible rail-law regimes — the CIM Uniform Rules governing Western Europe and the SMGS Convention governing Russia, Central Asia, and China — which historically required each shipment's consignment note to be entirely reissued at the interface point until the introduction of the Common CIM/SMGS Consignment Note in 2006. Geopolitical-institutional barriers arise from the corridor's continued dependence on Russian transit, which has accelerated interest in the Trans-Caspian International («Middle») Corridor through Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia as a hedge, despite the Middle Corridor's own multiplied border crossings and Caspian Sea ferry transshipment requirement. Conclusion. None of these barriers is being resolved by infrastructure investment alone; each has required — and continues to require — coordinated multilateral legal harmonization (the CIM/SMGS project), diversified routing (the Middle Corridor and the proposed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway), and border-capacity expansion pursued in parallel, with Kazakhstan positioned as a structurally indispensable transit state in every scenario short of full reliance on the Russian northern route.

Keywords: China-Europe Express Railway; Eurasian Land-Bridge; Belt and Road Initiative; break-of-gauge; CIM/SMGS; Middle Corridor; Trans-Caspian International Transport Route; rail freight; transport infrastructure; Kazakhstan.

Introduction

The China-Europe Express Railway (中欧班列) has expanded from a handful of experimental services in 2011 into a scheduled freight network that carried approximately 34,000 trains and 3.17 million TEUs in 2025, an increase of 9.8 per cent and 7.6 per cent respectively over the previous year [8]. Total cargo value carried since the service's inception surpassed USD 520 billion by mid-2026 [5]. This growth has occurred despite — not because of — the corridor's underlying institutional architecture, which was never designed as a single integrated system. The Eurasian Land-Bridge connects railway networks built under different empires, standards, and legal traditions: China's standard-gauge network, the 1520 mm broad-gauge network inherited from the Soviet Union and used across Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine, and the standard-gauge network of the European Union governed by an entirely separate body of international rail law.

The corridor's vulnerability to disruption at its institutional seams became acutely visible in 2025. Total China-EU rail freight volumes fell 1.3 per cent for the year even as total China Railway Express volumes (including non-EU destinations) grew, and when Poland closed its border crossings with Belarus in autumn 2025, the resulting backlog at the corridor's dominant crossing point took considerably longer to clear than the closure itself lasted [5,7]. Because an estimated 85 to 90 per cent of all China-Europe trains cross into the European Union through the single Malaszewicze–Brest gauge-break point, a disruption at this one node functions as a disruption to the entire corridor, illustrating how a network built for growth has not been built for redundancy [7].

This article examines the China-Europe Express Railway as a case study in overcoming regulatory and infrastructural barriers along the wider Eurasian Land-Bridge. The objective is twofold: to categorize the distinct types of barrier that have constrained the corridor's development — physical-infrastructural, legal-regulatory, and geopolitical-institutional — and to assess the measures adopted to date to overcome each, including gauge-transshipment infrastructure, the CIM/SMGS legal harmonization project, and the emergence of the Middle Corridor as an alternative routing.

Theoretical Framework

Land-bridge logistics scholarship distinguishes between hard infrastructure barriers (track gauge, terminal capacity, rolling stock availability) and soft or institutional barriers (customs procedures, differing legal liability regimes, documentation standards), arguing that soft barriers frequently impose greater delay and cost than hard ones once basic physical connectivity exists [11]. The Eurasian rail corridor is a paradigmatic case of this distinction: the physical break-of-gauge at China's borders with Kazakhstan (Alashankou–Dostyk, Khorgos–Altynkol) has existed since the corridor's inception and is now managed through purpose-built transshipment facilities with predictable, if not negligible, processing times of roughly 24 to 36 hours [15], whereas the legal duality between the CIM Uniform Rules (Western Europe, under the COTIF convention) and the SMGS Convention (Russia, the former Soviet space, and China) had no comparable technical fix and required a purpose-built diplomatic and legal harmonization process running continuously since at least 2006 [13].

This framework generates the following propositions guiding the case analysis. P1: physical break-of-gauge barriers, while structurally permanent, have been substantially mitigated through containerization and dedicated transshipment infrastructure, such that their marginal cost to the corridor is now smaller than commonly assumed. P2: legal-regulatory barriers arising from the CIM/SMGS divide have imposed a larger and more persistent drag on corridor efficiency than the physical gauge break itself, precisely because they cannot be resolved by capital investment alone. P3: geopolitical concentration risk — specifically the corridor's historical dependence on a single Russian transit route and a single EU entry point — constitutes the most severe unresolved barrier, as evidenced by the corridor-wide impact of the 2025 Poland–Belarus border closure.

Materials and Methods

This article uses a single-case, embedded case-study design, treating the China-Europe Express Railway as the case and its three principal barrier categories — physical-infrastructural, legal-regulatory, and geopolitical-institutional — as embedded units of analysis. Evidence was drawn from three source types: (i) operational and volume data published by the Eurasian Rail Alliance Index, China State Railway Group, and China's General Administration of Customs; (ii) primary and secondary legal-institutional sources documenting the CIM/SMGS harmonization process, including UNECE and OSJD/CIT publications; and (iii) trade-press and industry-analysis reporting on specific disruption events, border-crossing capacity, and the emergence of alternative routings, spanning 2018 to mid-2026. Because the corridor's traffic patterns and border-crossing arrangements have shifted materially since the escalation of Russia–Ukraine hostilities in 2022 and again following the 2025 Poland–Belarus border closure, the analysis privileges the most recent (2025–2026) data for volume and routing claims while drawing on earlier sources for the corridor's institutional and legal history.

Results

Physical-infrastructural barriers: the break-of-gauge. China's rail network uses the 1435 mm standard gauge common to Europe, but the entire intervening space — Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine — uses the 1520 mm broad gauge inherited from the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, with a second, smaller gauge break occurring at the Georgia–Turkey border on the southern Middle Corridor route [1]. This requires either bogie exchange, in which a wagon's wheelsets are physically swapped, or container transshipment by crane, at every crossing of the 1435/1520 boundary. Containerization has substantially reduced the practical cost of this barrier: crane transshipment of a container takes minutes, whereas bogie exchange — still common for bulk wagonload freight — is markedly slower [15]. Purpose-built facilities at Khorgos–Altynkol and Alashankou–Dostyk on the China–Kazakhstan border, and at Malaszewicze–Brest on the Poland–Belarus border, now process the large majority of container traffic with transshipment times reported in the range of 24 to 36 hours at the Chinese–Kazakh crossings [4], a level of process maturity consistent with Proposition P1: the gauge break remains a structural fact of the corridor but is no longer, in itself, the binding constraint on throughput that it was in the corridor's early years.

Legal-regulatory barriers: the CIM/SMGS divide. A more persistent barrier arises from the coexistence of two incompatible international rail-law regimes. Western Europe applies the CIM Uniform Rules under the Convention concerning International Carriage by Rail (COTIF); Russia, China, and the broader 1520 mm space apply the SMGS Convention. Historically, a shipment crossing this legal boundary required its entire consignment note to be reissued under the second regime at the interface point, creating delay, documentary risk, and legal uncertainty over liability in the event of loss or damage [11]. The 2006 introduction of the Common CIM/SMGS Consignment Note, developed jointly by the International Rail Transport Committee (CIT) and the Organisation for Cooperation of Railways (OSJD), allowed a single consignment note to remain valid across both legal regimes, and by 2019 was reported in use on more than fifty transport axes across four TEN-T corridors, with customs processing time reportedly reduced from up to three days to approximately 1.5 hours on some routes [10]. A 2013 Political Declaration signed by thirty-seven countries under UNECE auspices committed signatories to pursue a fuller Unified Railway Law, and a parallel contractual instrument — the General Terms and Conditions for Eurasian Rail Transport Contracts (GTC EurAsia) — has since 2019 offered participating railways an opt-in contractual bridge between the two regimes pending full legal unification [11,12]. That this harmonization project has required continuous diplomatic effort for two decades, and remains incomplete, is itself evidence for Proposition P2: the legal barrier has proven more resistant to resolution than the physical one, precisely because it depends on multilateral legal convergence rather than capital investment.

Geopolitical-institutional barriers: concentration and rerouting. The corridor's most severe demonstrated vulnerability is geopolitical concentration. Between 85 and 90 per cent of China-Europe trains have historically entered the European Union through the single Malaszewicze–Brest crossing, with some estimates for the dominant container service running as high as 95 per cent [5]. When Poland closed its border crossings with Belarus in autumn 2025 for security reasons unrelated to rail logistics, trains continued moving only under sanctions and paperwork constraints, and the backlog that formed took considerably longer to clear than the closure itself, since the alternatives — a Kaliningrad routing and the Middle Corridor — together absorbed only a small single-digit percentage of the disrupted flow rather than substituting for it [5]. A new multimodal terminal designed specifically to expand transshipment capacity at this bottleneck was scheduled for completion only in June 2026, underscoring how far infrastructure investment has lagged the corridor's exposure to a single-point failure [5].

This vulnerability, compounded by the broader disruption to Russian-transit reliability since 2022, has accelerated investment in the Middle Corridor (formally the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route), which links China to Europe via Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, and Georgia while bypassing Russia entirely. The Middle Corridor carries its own structural costs, however: cargo must cross at least four international borders, requires a Caspian Sea ferry crossing with its own lift-on/lift-off transshipment, and encounters a second gauge break at Kars, where the 1520 mm network meets Turkey's 1435 mm standard gauge [1,6]. Kazakh authorities have nonetheless expanded border-crossing capacity from eighteen to thirty-three daily trains at key points, and a proposed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway, whose construction began in 2025, is projected to add a shorter direct route capable of handling 10 to 12 million tonnes annually once complete [4], positioning Kazakhstan and Central Asia as the indispensable transit geography under essentially every diversification scenario, consistent with Proposition P3.

Discussion

The case demonstrates that the three barrier categories are not equally tractable, and that the corridor's operators and sponsoring governments have implicitly ranked them in that order of difficulty. The physical gauge break was addressed first and most completely, through decades of investment in dedicated transshipment infrastructure whose remaining constraint is now largely one of throughput capacity rather than technical feasibility. The legal-regulatory divide has required, and continues to require, sustained multilateral institutional effort — the CIM/SMGS project remains, by its own proponents' account, a first step toward a fuller Unified Railway Law rather than a completed harmonization — precisely because no engineering solution exists for two sovereign legal traditions. The geopolitical-concentration barrier is the least resolved of the three: the Middle Corridor exists as a demonstrated alternative but not yet a substitute, both because its own infrastructure (Caspian ferries, the Kars gauge break, multiple border crossings) remains less mature than the northern route's, and because building genuine redundancy would require deliberately foregoing some of the efficiency gained by concentrating traffic through a single, well-optimized crossing such as Malaszewicze.

For Kazakhstan specifically, this analysis carries a clear structural implication: irrespective of which routing scenario prevails — continued northern-route dominance, Middle Corridor growth, or eventual CKU railway completion — the country sits at an obligatory gauge-break and transit point in every configuration. This gives Kazakhstan a durable strategic position in Eurasian land-bridge logistics that does not depend on the outcome of any single infrastructure project, but it also means that Kazakh border-crossing capacity and customs efficiency at Dostyk, Khorgos, and the Caspian ports function as a shared constraint on corridor throughput regardless of which route shippers ultimately favor.

Three limitations qualify these conclusions. First, corridor volume and routing data for 2025–2026 remain provisional and are drawn substantially from trade-press and industry-analysis sources rather than peer-reviewed statistics, reflecting the pace of change in this sector; figures should be treated as indicative of direction and order of magnitude rather than precise measurement. Second, the case-study method does not permit a counterfactual estimate of how much larger corridor volumes might be in the absence of each barrier category; a natural extension would combine this qualitative mapping with a quantitative gravity or cost-modelling approach to estimate the trade volume foregone to each barrier type. Third, the geopolitical situation affecting Russian transit and the Poland–Belarus border remains fluid, and conclusions regarding the durability of the Middle Corridor's role as a hedge should be revisited as the situation develops.

Conclusion

This case study has examined the China-Europe Express Railway as a lens onto the broader regulatory and infrastructural barriers of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, distinguishing physical-infrastructural barriers (the 1435/1520 mm gauge break), legal-regulatory barriers (the CIM/SMGS legal duality), and geopolitical-institutional barriers (routing concentration and dependence on Russian transit). The evidence indicates that these barriers have been addressed with markedly different degrees of success: gauge-break infrastructure is now mature and largely adequate to current traffic; legal harmonization through the CIM/SMGS consignment note and the broader Unified Railway Law project has made real but incomplete progress after two decades of sustained multilateral effort; and geopolitical concentration risk remains the corridor's most exposed vulnerability, as the 2025 Poland–Belarus border closure demonstrated in practice.

The principal contribution of this article is to show that «overcoming barriers» on the Eurasian Land-Bridge is not a single undertaking but three distinct projects operating on different timescales and requiring different instruments — engineering investment, multilateral legal diplomacy, and route diversification — each of which is necessary but none of which is sufficient on its own. For Kazakhstan and other Central Asian transit states, the practical implication is that continued investment in border-crossing capacity and customs efficiency remains strategically valuable regardless of which future routing configuration — northern, Middle Corridor, or CKU-based — ultimately carries the largest share of Eurasian rail freight.

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