OREANDA-NEWS. The Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation explained in an official response - which was prepared jointly with the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Finance and the Federal Customs Service of Russia - to a request from the head of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy Andrei Kutepov, that more than 150 thousand freight cars are idle, TASS reports citing the text of the document.

“The change in the direction of freight traffic caused by sanctions restrictions, the rapidly changing market conditions create an accumulation of unclaimed rolling stock. <...> This negatively affects the operational environment, makes it difficult to move laden wagons, ”the department’s response says.

They added that on the Russian railway network “more than 440 industrial enterprises and enterprises of industrial railway transport adjoin”, where there are ways to lay down more than 63 thousand cars.

Based on this information, the department recommended an assessment of the fleet of wagons that will actually be involved in the transportation of goods and determine their number for sludge.

The Ministry of Transport evaluated the proposal for the gratuitous provision of public tracks by Russian Railways to organize the sludge of unclaimed cars, talking about the company's possible losses in the amount of about 1 billion rubles. per year with the introduction of a moratorium on the collection of money for the use of railway infrastructure for such a purpose.

Earlier, the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) of Ukraine announced the initiation of the nationalization procedure for more than a hundred wagons and tanks in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, owned by entrepreneurs from the Russian Federation and Belarus.