Rail transport in Russia

Rail transport in Russia has been called as one of the economic wonders of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century.^[1] The Russian railways are ranked second longest globally, behind the railways of the United States. The volume of freight hauled is third behind the United States and China. In overall density of operations (freight ton-kilometers + passenger-kilometers)/length of track), Russia is second only to China.

Like most railways Russian Railroad carries both freight and passengers, it is one of the most freight-dominant railways in the world, behind only Canada, the United States, and Estonia in the ratio of freight ton-kilometers to passenger-kilometers. However per head of population intercity passenger travel is far greater than the United States (which has the lowest long distance passenger train usages in developed world). Measured by the share of freight carried, Russian railroad is second to none among the world's largest railways in its importance to its country's economy.

Russia's railways are divided into seventeen regional railways, from the October Railway serving the St. Petersburg region to the Far Eastern Railway serving Vladivostok, with the free-standing Kaliningrad and Sakhalin Railways on either end. The regional railways were closely coordinated by the Ministry of the Means of Communication until 2003, and the Joint Stock Company Russian Railways, Rossiiskie Zheleznyie Dorogi or RZD, since then – including the pooling and redistribution of revenues. This has been crucial to two long-standing policies of cross-subsidization: to passenger operations from freight revenues, and to coal shipments from other freight.

Russian Railways accounts for 2.5%^[2] of Russia's GDP. The percentage of freight and passenger traffic that goes by rail is unknown, since no statistics are available for private transportation such as private automobiles or company-owned trucks. In 2007, about 1.3 billion passengers^[3] and 1.3 billion tons of freight^[4] went via Russian Railways. In 2007 the company owned 19,700^{[citation needed]} goods and passenger locomotives, 24,200 passenger cars (carriages) (2007) and 526,900 freight cars (goods wagons) (2007).^[5] A further 270,000 freight cars in Russia are privately owned (needs source).

In 2009 Russia had 128,000 kilometers of common-carrier railway line, of which about half is electrified and carries most of the traffic, over 40% was double track or better.^[6][7]

In 2013 railways carried nearly 90% of Russia's freight, excluding pipelines.^[8][9]

Besides the common-carrier railways that are well covered by government statistics there are many industrial railways(such as mining or lumbering railways) whose statistics are covered separately, and which in 1981 had a total length almost equal to the length of the common carrier railways.^[10][11] Currently (2008) they are only about half the length of the common-carrier system.^[12] In 1980, about two-thirds of their freight flowed to and from the common-carrier railroads while the remaining third was internal transport only on an industrial railways.^[13] (For example, a lumber company uses its private industrial railways to transport logs from a forest to its sawmill.) About 4% of the industrial railway traffic was on track jointly "owned" by two companies.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 1499