The efforts of Russian Railways to remove imported containers from the Far East using gondola cars led to an "unexpected" effect. As a result of the imbalance of import and export cargo flows, empty containers have accumulated in the center and west of Russia, which cannot be taken back to the Far Eastern ports due to the congestion of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

“What is it planned to do with these boxes in the European part in this plan?”, the IPEM deputy head asked a colleague from the Institute for Transport Economics and Development (IEDT), who developed a program for Russian Railways, who was present at the conference.

Deputy head of IERT Alexei Zamkovoi was categorical. “We definitely don’t have any opportunity to take these empty containers to the East,” he said. - All the needs of the economy have increased so that even for cargo, the possibilities are very limited, there is an active increase in <transportation> in all directions, and it is clear that then you need to look for some other ways.

As an alternative, he offered two options. “The first is to try to find the cargo, load it, and transport it loaded to the East. Other paths are other routes to return <container> to places of loading in Asia, including through the North-West, including through the Azov-Black Sea basin, perhaps some other ways. But here they should already be worked out, among other things, by the owners of <containers>,» Aleksey Zamkovoy believes.

The full text of the article can be found on the websites INFRANEWS and KORABEL.RU.