For a trade route billed as the 21st century's answer to the Silk Road, the Middle Corridor has spent most of its short life apologising for itself. Goods shipped by rail from China to Europe via the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus took anywhere from 38 to 53 days door-to-door, competitive on the face of it with the Northern Route through Russia that it is supposed to replace, but far less so when the inefficiencies at ports, border crossings, and rail gauge switches are considered.

The most recent evidence arrived this month in the unglamorous form of a customs pilot. For the first time, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan carried out a cross-Caspian consignment by utilizing the eTIR system, which consists of an innovative process of electronic transit replacing a pile of documents traditionally stamped at each border crossing point. An eastbound consignment departed from Azerbaijan, traveled via ferry across the Caspian Sea to Turkmenbashi, and after crossing Turkmenistan reached Uzbekistan at Farap, covering over 1,200 km by land, sea and rail in one digital process.

Perhaps his technological feat is more limited in scope than what its announcement implies: a single trial shipment does not make an operational corridor. However, what counts is the direction of travel. Freight shipments traveling through three different customs borders, via sea, using only one single electronic transit document as opposed to a paper document stamped anew at each border point, is exactly the sort of interoperability that the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB) see as........

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