Abstract Railway border reloading station is an important node of the interconnectivity of international railway transport corridor, which overall carrying capacity is critical to keep the corridor unblocked. Compared with general technical stations, the organization of cargo reloading at the station definitely has an impact on transport efficiency and capacity in addition to arriving, departing and conventional technical operations. By analyzing the operation steps and characteristics of railway border reloading station, the concept of overall carrying capacity was defined and its composition was confirmed. Based on this, the operation chain analysis method of the overall carrying capacity of the border reloading station was developed. Then we conduct a case study of Erlian station. Five operation chains were built to calculate the overall carrying capacity and identify the bottleneck. The operation chain analysis method proposed in this paper overcomes the defect of not considering the impact of the reloading operation on station capacity in the existing general technical station transport capacity calculation method. It can comprehensively consider the facilities and equipment of the station and the current traffic flow, so as to accurately find the weak links among them and provide a basis for the improvement of the transportation organization. Therefore, the conclusion is more scientific and reasonable.