Far East ahead!
The Russian Railways RŽD are staying on track. In 2020 the company increased the freight capacities on the Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) and on the main line of the Trans-Siberian Railway to 144 million t – in line with its long-term development plan through to 2025.
The Russian Railways RŽD have come a long way. In 2012 the annual volume of goods transported beyond Lake Baikal by rail stood at 58.1 million t. By 2020 this figure had reached 110.4 million t carried to Far Eastern ports (+8.6% year-on-year). The transport of coal in the same direction increased by 5% over 2019 to 100.9 million t. For the first time it was thus more than RŽD transports both to the south and to the west of the largest country in the world (98.8 million t).
At the beginning of March RŽD revealed that this growth was achieved thanks to targeted developments in eastern Russia. In 2020 the firm’s modernisation work on both Siberian railway axes saw projects on more than 100 infrastructure facilities completed. The efforts included the renewal of several railway stations, including the two hubs Volochayevka and Ikura, near Khabarovsk, as well as one in Novaya Chara.
A bottleneck in the south
Over and above this, the railway enterprise also laid more than 100 km of new mainline tracks last year, as well as rehabilitating 15 railway bridges. 2019 had only seen approximately 50 km of tracks on secondary lines laid, only a few stations and a total of only five bridges renovated.
Crossings are being completed in other places too. On 19 February a 494 m bridge across the Akhtuba river was inaugurated; the distributary of the Volga river in southern Russia is around 540 km long and flows towards the Volga Delta and the Caspian Sea. The video conference marking the event saw the participation of Andrey Belousov, the first deputy prime minister of the Russian government and president of the RŽD board; RŽD president and CEO Oleg Belozerov, and Igor Babushkin, governor of the region of Astrakhan.
The bridge replaced the last single-track section between Lake Baskunchak and Astrakhan and is, as Belozerov underlined, “one of the most important facilities to increase throughput towards ports in the Sea of Asov / Black Sea basin and in the north–south corridor running between Moscow and Kazakhstan.” In future, 154 train pairs can use the electrified line daily (up from 75).
