OREANDA-NEWS. Vladimir Yakunin, president of Russian Railways, has taken part in a Cabinet session to discuss the development of Russia’s sea ports and ports in Special Economic Zones.

“Russian ports are not working anywhere near as effectively as they should be, and do not facilitate the development of a unified transportation and logistics system. The terminals are not processing freight and loading and unloading it as required. An acute problem for Russian Railways is the frequent damage of rolling stock during unloading at ports and the long idle times of wagons at stations near the ports and on the approach lines,” said Yakunin.

Russian Railways has proposed a series of integrated measures in order to increase the efficiency of intermodal shipments via Russian seaports.

According to Yakunin, the legal basis has to be improved, above all the legislation governing the operation of different types of transport.

“In addition,” said Yakunin, “logistics centres have to be set up, including in cooperation with foreign partners, projects developed which guarantee agreed development of infrastructure and a unified document processing system.”

Using the Spreadsheets programme we have already set up a link with Excel, and using the Server programme block, using the DLL library, we are setting up a link with any user’s programme to solve organisational, managegment and commercial tasks,” said Yakunin.

According to Vladimir Yakunin, the result of all this work should be a major improvement in the quality of the services offered, an increase in comopetitiveness of Russian ports and of the transport system overall.