Against the prevailing narrative of the The Belt and Road as a top-down strategy to spread China’s geopolitical influence, there is the BRI’s impact through its first decade as emanating «from the middle out and bottom up» via transport-enabled corridors traversing a large number of regions within and across national territories.

The paper focuses on the railroad network across Eurasia that consists of six major corridors. The results obtained from this study establish the need to increase the processing capacity at border control points to maximize the utilizability.