Russian Railways has stopped sending containers to one of the main container terminals in the Moscow region - Selyatino - for 10 days, said company employees working with these terminals. The restriction is valid from November 12 to November 21 and is due to the fact that the terminal is overcrowded, and the Moscow Railway is overloaded, follows from the documents of Russian Railways.
A similar situation is in another large terminal - Elektrougli. Trains with containers cannot get there either - for more than 10 days they have been standing about 1000 kilometers from the capital, between Perm and Kirov.
Delays in delivery are huge - a month is considered a good time, and two months is no longer uncommon, key stations on the import route from the Far East to Central Russia are packed with abandoned trains, from which the locomotive was uncoupled and left on sidings for an indefinite period, shippers say. In most cases, Russian Railways explains the need to leave the train without movement by a lack of rolling stock and locomotive crews, employees of transport companies explain. The company lacks 2.5 thousand drivers, said Dmitry Shakhanov, Deputy General Director of Russian Railways.
The problem is so serious that in early November, the heads of several major railway operators complained about Russian Railways to presidential adviser Igor Levitin. They write that their shipper customers are increasingly faced with the lack of wagons for loading. According to their estimates, already in mid-October, 35-40% of the cargo intended for shipment to the central part of the country was not loaded on the West Siberian Railway. The reason, according to the operators, is that Russian Railways deliberately underestimate loading plans by at least a quarter, introduce unprecedented restrictions on the return of empty cars to the East and abandon trains. The state-owned company does not fulfill the announced plans for the development of infrastructure, the authors of the appeal indicate.
All this creates a threat to the export of imports from the Far East, operators are sounding the alarm.
A month ago, Russian Railways informed shippers that almost 600 trains are idle across the country - and only a tenth of them are in the Far East, employees of logistics companies say. Half of the trains were then on the Moscow Railway. But now the “epidemic” with the abandonment of trains has swept the entire railway network on the way from East to West, operators assure.
After all, the containers that have reached the central part of Russia stand kilometer-long walls at key transport hubs: there is nothing to carry back to the East in them, because the main export of Russia is raw materials or food, explains the head of the forwarding company.
