Northern East West Freight Corridor

The Northern East West Freight Corridor, usually referred to as the N.E.W. Corridor, is a project organized by the International Union of Railways UIC and Transportutvikling AS to connect the East Coast of the United States to East Asia by rail and maritime routes.
Route.
The plan calls for two main routes. Both routes start from east coast ports of North America such as Halifax Harbour, then across the Atlantic Ocean to the port of Narvik, from there by rail, often called the Eurasian Land Bridge, through Sweden to Finland and Russia. From Russia there are two routes: either via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vostochny Port, or though Kazakhstan to Ürümqi in China. From Ürümqi the route goes to Lanzhou and possibly to the port city Lianyungang.
The project was financed for a test run in 2006 through NEW Corridor AS, a company owned 65% by UIC and 35% by a Norwegian county, Nordland.
Current status.
As of 2020, there is no transshipment of containers between oceangoing ships and railway in Narvik. But the same year container transport of fish (eastbound) and mixed goods westbound between Narvik and Chongqing (China) started as an extension of the established rail connection between Helsinki (Finland) and Chongqing.
Benefits.
Transportutvikling claims in their report that this corridor will be an important alternative to the traditional shipping route from China to the U.S.A. The main reasons given are:
Problems.
Technical.
Major issues with the corridor are technical, financial and political. The technical issues are:
Political.
The political issues are more severe than the technical:
Financial.
The most crucial issues are financial. 
Start up issues.
There is also the problem financing the start up phase of the corridor. The Chinese, Kazakh, Russian, Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian bureaucracy has to approve plans, improve routines and train customs officers. There is need for infrastructure improvement. And finally there have to be enough trains to run at several times a day on a rail journey taking up to 14–28 days for a train round trip. 45 trains every day on a two-week round trip adds up to about 630 trains.
Competitive routes.
Apart from shipping all the way between USA and China, maritime/railways routes other than through Narvik are possible. Reloading could be done in Murmansk or in a port in the Baltic Sea, avoiding the break-of-gauge at the Swedish-Finnish border, and involving fewer countries. The Russians prefer to use their own ports. 
Suggestions involving building new railways include ports in Kirkenes or Skibotn in Norway, both without any break-of-gauge.
Containers China-Europe are not planned to go over Narvik; instead they go by rail all the way, either through Poland or through Finland. However shipping over the Indian Ocean/Suez Canal is the most common route for now. Reloading ship/rail is avoided especially if low volume, because of the delay to have enough number of trains to fill up a ship.
Containers USA-Europe go to other ports, depending on European destination. For Scandinavia they go through Gothenburg. For Russia they go through Saint Petersburg. It is hard to change this since the volume of these ports and the fact that they are located closer to the end-destination make them more competitive than Narvik.