The railway line from the eastern Chinese coastal city of Yiwu to the Spanish capital of Madrid is the world’s longest rail link. The freight route has been running for a few years, providing many advantages to bilateral trade.

After traveling through the 10,000-kilometer line across seven countries, the container trains reach the Spanish capital Madrid. The journey can be complicated, requiring different trains to accommodate the variety of railway track gauges along the way.

“Until the end of September this year, the train has been running for more than eighty times between Yiwu and Madrid and solved a great amount of difficulties existing either in logistics or in the coordination level,” Mao Wenjing, from the Yiwu-Madrid foundation, told CGTN’s Dan Williams.

The service is a fifth of the cost of sending goods by air and is significantly quicker than the sea option. In 2014, it took about 25 days to transport from Spain to China and now it only takes 18 days.

With future advancements expected, this ancient route is now quicker, more efficient and more developed than ever before.