Russian Railways sees small traffic fall on anti-epidemic steps

MOSCOW, Oct 9 (PRIME) -- Russian Railways see just a 0.3% decrease of cargo traffic after toughening of the anti-virus measures on the year in October, Deputy CEO Alexei Shilo told reporters late on Thursday.

"Our loading is 3.5 million tonnes (per day). This is a slight lag compared to last year's October, 0.3%. This is a bit better than the plan that we’ve set initially," Shilo said.

"We have registered no decrease in cargo traffic so far after the measures were toughened. And I think that we will not see it until the end of the year, I mean, we still have no really negative expectations."

He said that Russian Railways is revising all 2020 discounts to assess whether to prolong them for 2021. He said that all long-term discounts will be prolonged.

Russian Railways offers to raise the tariff on coal transportation but reduce it on high-yield cargo, such as ferrous metals, chemicals and ferrous metal scrap. Russian Railways can also cut tariffs that are partially state subsidized, such as oil product, vegetable, mineral fertilizers, container cargo, grain prices.

Russian Railways is ready to raise cut-rate traffic of Belarusian oil products to the Russian ports and to discuss discounts on transportation of Belarusian potash fertilizers, he said.

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