First trainload of oats sent from Chelyabinsk region to India via INSTC - Customs

CHELYABINSK. March 19 (Interfax) - The first export train of 30 wagons loaded with oats departed for India from Formachevo station, the Chelyabinsk Customs press service said.

"This is the first export shipment of unprocessed grain in 2024. Chelyabinsk customs officers conducted customs control procedures on three shipments of oats remotely," Acting Head of Chelyabinsk Customs Andrey Gursky, said.

The 830-tonne cargo was packed using the infrastructure of the Yuzhnouralsky transport and logistics complex (part of Yuzhnouralsky Dry Port LLC, a subsidiary of the State Transport Leasing Company), the release said.

Since the beginning of the year, Chelyabinsk customs officers have dispatched ten container trains for export to China, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, India and Saudi Arabia, the press service said. Both agricultural products and electrical insulators were included in the shipments from the region.

As reported, since spring of last year, Russian Railways began dispatching container trains via the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) from the RZD South Ural Railway's Chelyabinsk-Gruzovaya station. Since summer of last year, trains have been dispatched from Formachevo station, located near the Yuzhnouralsky Transport and Logistics Complex, whose infrastructure is used for the transshipment of containers from truck to rail.

It was also reported that the FESCO transport group launched a railway container service on the Vladivostok-Chelyabinsk (Formachevo) route in 2022, also making use of the Yuzhnouralsky TLC infrastructure.

The INSTC is a multimodal route for transporting passengers and cargo, with a total length of 7,200 km from St. Petersburg to the port of Mumbai. A significant part of it passes through Russian railways infrastructure, which, depending on the route, accounts for 33-53% of the total length of the land corridor. The main goal of the development of the INSTC is to serve Russia's foreign trade with the countries of Transcaucasia, the Caspian region, South Asia and the Persian Gulf.