The Trans-Eurasian freight train now arriving in London has your Chinese goods on board

Reports of the death of railways have been - in Mark Twain's terms - rather over-exaggerated. Two reports this week have highlighted an increasingly bright future for rail systems in providing a cleaner, greener way of moving people and freight.

China's emergence as an country with an environmental conscience is showing further evidence of development. The choice of railways to transport the country's manufactured exports right across Asia and then through Europe is set for further expansion. In 2016 over 1700 freight trains made the 12 000 km journey across two continents to deliver goods more rapidly than by sea, and with less carbon emissions than by air. That is double the number of journeys made in 2015, and they are set to rise further. Stopping off at various European depots to deliver freight containers, the trains made their first complete journey through to a London destination earlier this month. The challenge for the UK, as it seeks trade partnerships with countries beyond the EU, is to see if it can fill the returning trains with exports for the vast Chinese market.

Read the BBC News report on the Trans-Eurasian cargo train route (incl. video clip) here

In another good-rail-news story this last week reported in the Guardian here, Dutch railways announced that all their electric trains now run on wind energy as of this month. However, in a challenging statistical footnote, the original story was changed from stating that 'all trains ran on 100% wind energy now' to 'now 100% of trains run on wind energy'. You may like to decipher the difference, and consider how the re-write changes the significance of the news - and the accuracy of the headline.