About a third of the entire cargo carried along the TransSiberian rail route is currently destined either to or from Japan, told the audience at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum Oleg Belozerov, CEO of Russian Railways.
He added that in 2017, a record-breaking amount of Japanese cargo was carried, 44 mn tons, up almost 10% compared to 2016.
‘We offer our Japanese partners a full complex of logistics service including ‘just on time’ transportation, information support, multimodal door to door service. In October 2017, we established a ‘single window’ information service for Japanese companies’, O.Belozerov said.
Speaking of future plans, he mentioned the intention of Russian Railways to develop seamless logistics in the North-East Asia providing efficient combination of ocean and rail routes.
‘We plan a series of test shipments in cooperation with the Transport Ministry of Japan’, he said.
A more long-sighted – and most large-scale – project is the construction of a Sakhalin – Hokkaido crossing. The technical parameters of this project require a very detail consideration. According to a preliminary estimation, the route could carry up to 30 mn tons per annum.