HANGZHOU, June 18 (Xinhua) -- A freight train, loaded with 100 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) of goods including daily necessities, apparel and hardware accessories, departed east China's Jinhua City on Wednesday, bounding for the Turkmenbashi seaport in Turkmenistan.

After reaching Turkmenbashi, the cargo will be shipped across the Caspian Sea to Baku, Azerbaijan. The train inaugurated the Jinhua-Turkmenbashi-Baku multimodal transport corridor over the Caspian Sea, which is the 26th China-Europe freight route originating from Zhejiang Province.

The train will exit China via Xinjiang's Horgos in the northwest of the country, before traversing key Central Asian cities like Almaty in Kazakhstan, Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Ashgabat in Turkmenistan en route to Turkmenbashi, according to Wu Xiaoping, director of the Jinhua operation department of the railway logistics center in the Zhejiang provincial capital of Hangzhou.

This route employs "rail-sea-rail" multimodal transport. By utilizing the Turkmenbashi seaport for the Caspian Sea crossing instead of the traditional route, the logistics path is optimized -- reducing the total transit time by approximately one day.

The new route will accelerate the flow of goods between China and the markets of the five Central Asian countries and Central and Eastern Europe, fostering smoother trade between China and the countries along this route, Wu added. ■