With its environmental, social and economic advantages, rail is a fitting response to the challenges of mass passenger and freight mobility. It plays a major role in the decarbonisation of the economy and thus contributes to the preservation of the planet.

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.