MOSCOW: January 15, 2019. The FESCO Transportation Group has begun operating a weekly container train from Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang Province to Moscow via Mongolia following the arrival of its first service on January 11, this year.

The total transit time was 14 days and the train routed via the Mongolian border crossings of Erlian and Zamyn-Uud and Naushki, Russia.

The company plans to move 400-500 TEU per month of consumer goods from China and plans to add reefer containers to carry perishables in the near future.

The group started working on the route between China and Russia at the end of 2016 by launching a Tianjin-Moscow train before adding services to Germany via Mongolia in August the following year.

FESCO, formerly known as the Far East State Shipping Company, also delivers export cargo from Krasnoyarsk via Kazakhstan to Chengdu, Sichuan Province and Xian, Shaanxi Province. In 2018 its rail volume between China, Russia and Europe totalled 12,400 TEU, three times times higher than in 2017.

The company is one Russia’s major public transportation and logistics businesses with interests in ports, rail, integrated logistics and shipping. The majority of its operations are located in the Russian Far East where it has a fleet of 20 ships, domestic sea container lines and rail services. The company also controls the commercial port of Vladivostok that has a capacity of five million tons of general cargo and oil products, 150,000 vehicles and over 600,000 TEU containers.

FESCO is also one of Russia’s 10 largest private rail operators with a fleet of 14 thousand units of rolling stock, including 5,000 container platforms and 40,000 containers.