Page 60 - UKRRptOct19

● Trains
To accommodate the China traffic, Belarusian Railways completed this month a $10mn, 150% expansion of its rail car processing at its Brest North station. ​To cross the rail break between Soviet and European gauges, each car has to be lifted off the tracks for a wheel change. The number of containers crossing this Belarus-Poland gauge break is to grow from 350,000 this year to 500,000 next year. Ukrzaliznytsia wants to develop Kovel, the Volyn rail hub 130 km south of Brest, as a rail alternative for the booming China trade.
​Ukrzaliznytsia​ (Ukrainian Railway) is doubling its rail purchases – ​to 70,000 tons in 2020 – to upgrade 507 km of track next year. Despite this massive purchase, probably from Metinvest’s Azovstal plant in Mariupol, the track only amounts to 2.5% of the state railroad’s massive 20,000 km network. Earlier this year, the railroad closed 1,857 km of track due to poor conditions and low levels of freight. Despite these closures, speed limit warnings have grown by 35% over the last two years, to cover 339 sections of track, reports the Center for Transportation Strategies.
● Ships
About 170 representatives of 46 foreign and Ukrainian companies attended a high-level information session on Ukraine’s first seaport concessions​: for Olbia and Kherson ports. Infrastructure Minister Krikliy predicted in Odesa on Tuesday that these two pilot concession projects will be “the basis for creating a conceptually new approach” to public-private partnerships in Ukraine in the 2020s.
Four Black Sea ports handled 87% of the nation’s sea cargo​. They are: Pivdennii -- up 28.4% to 33.5mn tons; Mykolaiv – up 24% to 21mn tons; Chornomorsk – up 21.4% to 16.6mn tons; and Odesa – up 17%, to 16.2mn tons.
The new government’s goal is to triple river cargo to 30mn tons by 2022,
says Yuriy Lavrenyuk, deputy Infrastructure Minister. Last year, 10mn tons were carried by the river. Through July of this year, river cargo is up by one third over 2018 levels. Noting that the Rada is to consider an Inland Water Transport bill this fall, he says: “It is necessary to transfer cargo from roads to river transport.” In the late Soviet era, 60mn tons of cargo moved up and down the Dnipro.
Through August, Ukraine’s seaports have handled 100mn tons of cargo, 19% more than in the same period last year​. The two leaders are grain – up 39% to 34mn tons; and ore – up 32% to 24mn tons. Containers are up 20% to 104,000. As ever-larger vessels dock in Ukraine, the number of ship calls was up by only 26, to 7,761, reports the Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority.
Ukraine’s new government wants to move ahead with a long term plan to unite waterways from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea,​ says Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk. “This is absolutely real,” he says of links that go back to the Vikings. “There are 40 waterways that need to be negotiated with Belarus and Poland.”
Cargo on the Dnipro was up 29% through August, y-o-y, to 6.9 million
60​ UKRAINE Country Report​ October 2019 ​ ​www.intellinews.com