A surge in freight traffic volume will most likely entail an increase in the length of "bottlenecks" on the Russian Railways network to 14,500 km by 2015 and to 19,200 km in 2020, the Company press release said. The state-owned rail monopoly insists that it will not be able to handle the problem without the government’s financial support.
There was an 11-percent growth in traffic to Russian ports (largely to North-West region) in January-September versus 3.5% a year earlier.
RZD forecasts further growth in freight traffic adding the rail infrastructure will hardly be able to handle the volume, which is predicted at more than 1.9 billion tons by 2020.