Volume of Freight on Kaliningrad Railway Line to Be Reduced

The management of the Kaliningrad railway line has decided to dramatically reduce the volume of freight transported on the Kaliningrad line. As a Rosbalt correspondent was informed by Alexander Pershin, press secretary to the line manager, the reason for this decision was delays of more than 20 days in unloading wagons.

Due to orders from consignees the Kaliningrad line delivers 800 carriages to the region every day, although they are only able to unload 560 carriages. According to transportation services, in order to cope with this flow of freight the Kaliningrad trading port would have to unload 350 carriages a day and the marine terminal would have to unload 215 carriages a day. In reality these figures are only 150 and 47 respectively. As a result, since the end of last year there have been 3.5-3.7 thousand carriages waiting to be unloaded at the stations and on the local railways in the Kaliningrad Region.

The Kaliningrad Region's total volume of preferences as a result of reduced charges totaled almost USD 2 million in 2002 and the Kaliningrad railway line's losses as a result of carriages not being unloaded came to USD 1.26 million. The Kaliningrad line's decision to spend millions of dollars on equipping the main line with an automatic block system, which would increase its freight capacity many times over, seems absurd given such circumstances. Using the current infrastructure the Kaliningrad line transported almost twice as much freight in 2002 as it did in 2001 while only working at 80% capacity.

The Kaliningrad railway line sees the only way out of this situation as limiting the volume of freight according to its ability to unload the carriages and this is what it is trying to do.