OREANDA-NEWS. April 09, 2012. Vladimir Yakunin, President of Russian Railways, summed up the Company’s March 2012 performance during a recent conference call, reported the press-centre of Russian Railways. 

"In March, we managed to compensate for the relative decline in shipping volumes we saw in February 2012 due to adverse weather conditions. During the first quarter, the average daily loading volume exceeded last year’s level by nearly 3%," said Vladimir Yakunin during the call.
Yakunin reported that the average daily loading volume in March was 3,485,000 tons, an increase of 3.2% compared to March 2011. He said that the loading rate assumed in March must be maintained this month.

"A constraint on loading volumes remains the focus on exports using railway lines with insufficient through capacity. This is especially true on approaches to seaports, where up to 150 "abandoned" trains can accumulate," said Yakunin.

According to Yakunin, systemic work with freight shippers, wagon owners and stevedores had to continue in order to maintain the rate of shipping volume growth. Yakunin also said that particular attention should be paid to the transportation of agricultural products in the current season and that at present, a plan of measures had been worked out for the mass transportation of the new harvest of agricultural products and shipment of goods produced by the agro-industrial complex.

In March, he said, efforts continued to improve the efficiency of the transportation process. In order to minimise empty runs and idle wagons, a series of measures was implemented to ensure the transition to a system in which private empty wagons are moved to the correct address and accepted for carrying goods only when there is an agreed proposal for subsequent loading at the destination station.

Speaking of transport safety, Vladimir Yakunin gave the statistics for derailments in March. Four derailments occurred due to breakages of the side frames of freight wagon bogies, one of which resulted in a serious crash of freight trains at Aur Station on Far Eastern Railways on 11 March and led to the derailment of 29 wagons and the electric locomotive. Four catenary pillars were knocked down and 350 metres of track damaged. The locomotive’s crew also suffered.

As Yakunin said, in the first quarter, the Company’s employees carried out visual inspections which revealed almost 6,800 defective side frames, of which nearly one third were subsequently confirmed to have developing defects by means of defectoscopy. Russian Railways will continue to work on changes to the regulations aimed at increasing the responsibility of manufacturers for product quality.