A woman crosses the rails close to one of the railway stations in the Tula Region.
Photo: Pavel Smertin
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Russian Railways to Connect Russia and America
Quite soon, Russian Railways will present to President Putin the draft project of delivering containers from China and Southeast Asia via Murmansk and towards the U.S. eastern coast, RBC Daily reports. The obvious advantage of the project is the nearly two-fold reduction in delivery time by shifting from sea shipment of cargo. Nevertheless, the project implementation is hindered by the lack of container yards in the northern Europe and no container terminal available in Murmansk. Another concern is attracting the cargo for this route.
At present, Russian Railways is busy hatching the project to shift cargo flow from the Trans-Siberian Railway to St. Petersburg-Murmansk route and deliver it from China to the U.S. eastern coast. The shipment is estimated at 4 million TEUs, RBC Daily found out.
As to the actual moves, the Transport Ministry of Russia put forward six big projects during the conference held in Tokyo at the end of past week. One of them, the project of container delivery via Murmansk, was presented in an effort to lure Japan in comprehensive development of Murmansk traffic center that will allow transshipping containers from Asia to Scandinavia and to the eastern coast of the United States.
Today, the containers are shipped 20,000 miles by sea, while the Murmansk transit will cut the time two fold, Alexander Davydenko, head of the Federal Sea and River Transport Agency, said some time earlier.
But apart from the lack of container yards in the northern Europe and non-availability of container terminal in Murmansk, the port of Murmansk is essentially not fit for the entry of superships and loaded at nearly 90 percent of capacity already today.
“Construction of full-value transport corridor will require building various logistic centers and cargo terminals, updating border crossing points,” said Mikhail Ganelin, analysts of CenterInvest.
Another concern is attracting the cargo. Russian Railways will be able to ship 500,000 containers on year, SeaNews projects, and widen the number to 2 million once the required facilities are put in operation, while the sea shipping reaches 20 million.
www.kommersant.com
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