OREANDA-NEWS. October 03, 2011. Vladimir Yakunin, the President of Russian Railways, chaired the XX Plenary Session of the international association of the Coordinating Council on Transsiberian Transportation (CCTT) in Odessa in Ukraine, reported the press-centre of RZD.

The session was attended by over 200 members and invited guests of the CCTT from 23 countries, including Boris Kolesnikov, Ukraine’s Deputy Premier and Minister of Infrastructure, Vladimir Kozak, Managing Director of Ukraine’s State Railway Transport Administration, and the heads of other railway administrations, ports, shipping companies, international transport organisations and government representatives.

The Russian Railways delegation was headed by Company President Vladimir Yakunin, who in his address spoke about the current state of and future prospects for the development of traffic on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

In the first half of this year, the Trans-Siberian Railway carried 219,500 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of containers in international traffic, an increase of 52%, with imports increasing by 66%, exports by 41% and transit by 32%.

However, as Vladimir Yakunin noted, despite the significant percentage increase of transit freight volumes in 2010 compared to the crisis year of 2009, the absolute figures were insufficient given the transit potential of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The participants at the session discussed prospects for developing the Trans-Siberian Railway and implementing the project "Trans-Siberian Railway in 7 days."

They agreed that one of the most important tasks facing the rail industry in Russia was to create a reliable and efficient mechanism for transporting goods between Europe and Asia. The project "Trans-Siberian Railway in 7 days", which is being implemented by Russian Railways, was an effective way of competing with the more usual maritime traffic.

Russian Railways is actively preparing for an increase in traffic to and from the Far East. As the head of the Company noted, however, this requires serious investment. The Trans-Siberian Railway, for instance, will require investment of 193 billion roubles in 2010 prices by the end of 2015, while according to estimates, developing the Baikal-Amur Main Line (BAM) for the projected future traffic volumes in 2020 range from between 447 to 870 billion roubles, depending on how the economy and future freight flows will develop.

Vladimir Yakunin emphasised that the Trans-Siberian route is regarded as a single transcontinental route connecting countries in the Asia-Pacific region with Russia, the CIS, the Baltic States and Europe. At the present time, Russian Railways is actively working to expand the geography of the route.

"By establishing a direct rail link with South Korea after upgrading and modernising the Trans-Korean Main Line and its connection with the Trans-Siberian Railway, Russia will be able to create an optimal transit corridor between South Korea and Europe and compete successfully with the sea route for shipping cargo via the Suez Canal. As part of this project, Russian Railways is developing a new cargo route: from the port of Rajin in North Korea – Tumanga in North Korea – Khasan in Russia and on to Russia’s railway network and Europe," said Vladimir Yakunin.

According to Yakunin, a project currently under active development is the construction of a broad-gauge 1520mm railway line from the Slovak town of Kosice to Bratislava and Vienna.

"As you may recall, during the 19th plenary session of the CCTT in Bratislava last year, the international consulting firm Roland Berger Strategy Consultants made a public presentation for the first time on the results of the preliminary project study, which showed that the construction of the new line would attract from 16 to 24 million tons of additional cargo by 2050 to the route," said the president of Russian Railways.

In addition to addressing infrastructure problems, it is also necessary to focus on improving the legal framework for international cooperation in railway transport. Great progress in this area was achieved with the introduction of the common consignment note CIM / SMGS. In just seven months in 2011, more than 20,000 shipments between Europe and Asia were dispatched using the CIM / SMGS notes.

According to Vladimir Yakunin, a CCTT working group on the development of information technology is actively engaged in implementing a pilot project "Electronic Train" (e-train), whose goal is to implement end-to-end information technology in international freight transport.
The President of Russian Railways outlined a number of objective and subjective obstacles hindering the development of Trans-Siberian shipments.

The first category includes, in particular, the issue of tariffs. According to Vladimir Yakunin, in order to develop the logistics business, it will be necessary to abolish the state regulation of tariffs on transit rail shipments in containers and make the tariffs as flexible as possible.

A subjective factor is the impossibility of calculating the exact time of delivery due to the lack of clear technologies and regulations when goods are going through customs clearance.

Another negative factor is the presence of a large number of participants in the transportation and supply chain with their own commercial interests and widely differing business strategies.

"In this area, things obviously have to be integrated in order to offer the market an integrated, pass-through service with the requisite parameters of price and quality," said Vladimir Yakunin.

Yakunin added that one of the factors in developing fully-fledged transit traffic on the Trans-Siberian railway would be to create a major international logistics operator for transit shipments in the East – West direction with ownership held by a wide range of partners.

At the same time, the head of Russian Railways said that at present there were a number of examples where cargo transportation had been successfully organised, such as the Open Joint Stock Company TransContainer, which has launched two new products on the Euro-Asian transit market.

The first is organising container shipments between China and Europe via the border crossing at Zabaikalsk – Manchuria. The second is developing container transport on International Transport Corridor No. 5 between Trieste in Italy - Slovakia - Ukraine - Russia and using the leased terminal Dobra (Good) in Kosice in Slovakia.

Since May 2003, the Baltic-Transit train, which is run by the company FESCO Integrated Transport, has carried more than 100,000 TEU containers. This year, volumes have continued to grow and in the 1st half of 2011, the Baltic-Transit carried 9,490 containers.

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The Coordinating Council on Transsiberian Transportation is an international nonprofit transportation association formed in 1997 by Russia’s Ministry of Communications, DB AG, the European Trans-Siberian Operators’ Association and the Korean International Freight Forwarders Association.

In accordance with the CCTT’s Charter, the Council’s Chairman is the president of Russian Railways on a permanent basis, the Vice-Chairmen are the presidents of freight forwarding associations from Russia, Europe, South Korea and Japan which are members of the CCTT.