Researching On A New Ocean-rail Pattern Of Coal Transportation In China

Coal is the strategic energy in China. It plays a very important role on China’s economic and social development, but it is in an extremely unbalanced condition on space distribution. Therefore, the coal supply of our nation depends on the efficiency of the coal transportation system. As an important mode of coal transportation, the ocean-rail pattern has a unique advantage on long distance transportation. The traditional ocean-rail transportation system need reload from trains to ships, and it requires a lot of land resources as the storage yard for buffering. The extensive construction and operation pattern of traditional ocean-rail transportation system is the bottleneck of the coal transportation system.The train ferry connects the railway line which is separated by the water to change the loading-unloading way from Lift-on/Lift-off to Roll-on/Roll-off. Compared with the sea-land transportation,realizing the door-to-door transportation. Compare with the traditional pattern of ocean-rail transportation, it has big advantages in shortening the berthing time of ships and the traveling time of cargo, utilizing of land resources, environment protection and transportation safety. Considering the development of railway ferry technology which used to apply to short distance transportation, nearly no one refer it to bulk cargo transportation.In this paper, we apply the train ferry to transportation system of coal.By using the technical feasibility analysis, especially the analysis on the passing capacity of train ferry system, it proves the probability of the application of train ferry via specific numerical example. Then using the With-and-without method, we analyze the social cost and benefit of train ferry system which applies in coal transportation system through calculating the construction and operation cost, finally we compare the data with traditional system. The result shows that the railway ferry does not have the national economic advantage in the existing technical conditions. However, in the future, with the quick development of the technology, especially the development of flexible track and trestle and the increasing of loading efficiency,the train ferry will become more prominent on the contribution of national economy.