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International Internet Magazine. Baltic States news & analytics Thursday, 28.03.2024, 23:52

Estonian Railways: Russian transit showing signs of improvement

BC, Tallinn, 20.04.2016.Print version
Rail transit traffic volumes from Russia on the tracks of Estonian Railways have increased somewhat in the past week, yet further growth requires significantly more serious and also broader dialogue with Moscow, Sulev Loo, CEO of Estonian Railways (Eesti Raudtee), says, cites LETA/BNS.

"The situation is not quite as bad as it looks in the media, and last week the number of train pairs arriving from Russia increased from six to nine, which is still too little, however," Loo told BNS on Tuesday. He expressed hope that May will turn out a better month when it comes to rail transit traffic than April for Estonian Railways.

 

"What matters is that we are having a dialogue with decision makers in Russia. At the same time, we must communicate with them significantly more seriously than so far and also at a little bit higher level than just a person like me. A dialogue will help to find out what the reasons for our stalling might be," he said.

 

The CEO of Estonian Railways said that a disproportionately big amount of transit traffic is going through Latvia now.

 

"We must compete more with Latvia and get to know what our competitive edge compared with them could be, because objectively our coal terminal is better than theirs. Our oil terminal and fertilizer storage facilities are good. We are offering good quality. Hence we have to understand where things get stalled," he said.

 

Loo observed that the reductions in the traffic of heavy fuel oil are purely a result of low global oil prices, that is, of economic reasons. The CEO said he can see no political reasons for the drastic reduction in transit volumes from Russia.

 

"Where the solution lies now is that you have to communicate more with Russian Railways. We continue working on this. This is a business which requires experience to be able to understand who the decisions makers are and where there lines of force run," Loo said.

 

It was reported last week that the volume of rail transit traffic between Estonia and Russia has halved, from 12 to six train pairs a day. Ten years ago, in 2006, Estonian Railways received 32.4 trains from Russia per day on the average.






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