At 15:46 on June 27, a train loaded with canned asparagus exited from Caoxian Station of Jinan with the whistle sounding, ran for 9 hours to Qingdao Port, and through the Maritime Silk Road to Hamburg, Germany.
Caoxian, an ordinary small town in the southwest of Shandong, is the largest asparagus planting, processing and export base in China. It has an asparagus base of more than 133, 000 Square meters, with an annual output of 180,000 tons of high-quality fresh asparagus. Caoxian is the famous hometown of asparagus. The base in Caoxian accounts for more than two-thirds of the national asparagus base. The production plant of the star product in Countree Food——canned asparagus, is located here.
Tang Linling, the head of Heze Sangqing Food, came to Caoxian more than a decade ago, to set up an canned asparagus plant. What she valued was the developed asparagus planting industry in Caoxian. Countree Food-The global canned asparagus industry is ranked in the top three, and the products are very popular in the United States, Japan and Europe. Tang Linglin entrusted the automobile transportation to send the canned food to port to catch the ship before. However, there is always something to worry about.It has many inevitable factors for automobile transportation, for instance, it can't come in winter. There is no way to load containers in snowing day, because of this, delivery times are often delayed, which has a bad impact on foreign countries.
While since taking the train, there are 3 to 5 containers arrive at the factory on time every day, and they are shipped back to the train station on time in the afternoon during that day. In this way, the timeliness becomes higher.Now is the peak season for sale of asparagus products, and the railway department has also launched an "asparagus train" to achieve fixed-point, fixed-line, fixed-time, and fixed prices, so that transportation is no longer a problem.
Caoxian's processing and manufacturing industry is relatively developed, and asparagus products are exported to more than 30 countries in Europe, America and Southeast Asia. With a large number of products exported, as well as foreign trade products on the delivery time and transport quality of stringent requirements, the demand for freight transportation is increasing. Because of the concerted efforts of the railway department, ports and logistics companies, the container train from Caoxian to Huangdao Port opened smoothly in September 2016, becoming an important channel for local enterprises to participate in the “Belt and Road”.
Since container loading is carried out at night, for convenience of cargo owners, Caoxian Station provides one-stop service, arranges the measurement of the weight, container inspection, and field freight forwarders on duty 24 hours. Containers can enter the site and can be weighed and loaded at any time to ensure smooth transportation of the train. At the same time, the railway and the port actively contacted each other to realize the information interconnection between the two. The automatic collection of source information, intelligent classification, and railway transportation capacity allocation are scientific and reasonable, which greatly improves the efficiency of container turnover.
Caoxian station freight director Han Lingjian told reporters that, due to the wide range of application of the train, and the one-stop service, provides convenience for the export of enterprise products, and attracted many export companies.
With the improvement of services and the cultivation of the market, the effect of the supply of goods has begun to show. The supply of goods in Caoxian and surrounding areas has gradually increased, and it has spread to southwestern Shandong, Henan, Anhui and surrounding areas. More and more cargo owners choose to send goods by rail.
Director Yuan Ping of the Caoxian Bureau of Commerce had a deep understanding of that line: "This is a line for revitalization of rural economy. Enterprise export goods can be packaged, distributed, stored and transported on the spot. At the same time, it has reduced circulation links, improved logistics efficiency, reduced logistics costs, expanded product exports, and increased employment opportunities for local people, which provided a convenient and fast new channel for commodities from underdeveloped southwestern Shandong to go abroad. "