Russia might drop plan to build North Siberian railway due to high cost - paper
MOSCOW. Dec 3 (Interfax) - The Russian government has decided it does not make sense to build the North Siberian Railway (SevSib), consisting of sections from Nizhnevartovsk to Bely Yar and from Tashtagol to Urumqi in China, newspaper Kommersant reported on Wednesday.
Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Savelyev informed President Vladimir Putin of this in a letter, the paper said, citing a source.
The government has decided to abandon the project due to its high cost, the source said.
The cost of building SevSib is estimated at 50 trillion rubles, foremost due to the difficult terrain, while Russian Railways's (RZD) investment program has already been slashed. The paper said RZD's investments will not exceed 1 trillion rubles in 2026 after dropping to 890.9 billion rubles this year from 1.49 trillion rubles in 2024. The government plans to discuss RZD's investment program on December 11.
Putin ordered the government, together with the authorities of Kemerovo Region, the Russian Academy of Sciences and RZD, to present a report on SevSib back in August 2023. An assessment on the advisability of the project was included in the 2025 plan for implementing the Social and Economic Development Strategy for the Siberian Federal District to 2035.
RZD told the paper that it submitted its position on the implementation of this project to the Transport Ministry as instructed. The ministry has not commented and Savelyev's spokesman did not respond to questions.
The SevSib project called for building a railway of about 2,000 km along the route Nizhnevartovsk - Bely Yar - Ust-Ilimsk. The project was included in the Strategy for Developing Russia's Railway Transportation to 2023 that was approved in 2008 and the Strategy for the Social and Economic Development of the Far East and Baikal Region to 2025 approved in 2009. The design of the railway was scheduled to begin in 2016, but then it was decided to return to the project after 2020.
Another section of SevSib, Tatshtagol to Urumqi, calls for building a new gateway to China across the 55-km western stretch of the Russian-Chinese border in Altai, between Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Due to the difficult topography, the construction of two tunnels through the Altai Mountains, one Russian and one Chinese, was considered, but nothing came of this.
In 2021, then former deputy CEO of RZD Alexei Shilo said a tunnel would be very expensive, but if the railway was built on trestles it was "quite possible that the price of construction will be recouped by the advantages that we'll get."
Materials from the Federation Council's committee on the development of Siberia said that SevSib would make it possible to redistribute the load on Russia's eastern railways and connect the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Northern Sea Route (NSR), creating an additional transport corridor for coal exports from Kemerovo and other regions in Siberia.
The eastern railways remain the most popular transport artery for shipping Russian commodities to premium Asian markets, but their expansion has stalled due to the cuts to RZD's investment program.
The president of the National Research Center for Transportation and Infrastructure, Pavel Ivankin said SevSib is nonetheless needed, because without this railway it will be impossible to attract a significant portion of the freight base - from Kemerovo Region, Khakassia and the Urals - to the NSR.
In the current economic environment, work is unlikely to begin in the next two years, he said. The earliest it could start is in the period from mid-2027 to the beginning of 2028. But work on the SevSib project must begin before the end of 2028, otherwise the NSR will not have the transport infrastructure it needs, Ivankin said.
He believes the cost estimate of 50 trillion rubles is accurate due to the permafrost conditions. The cost could even increase following survey and design work, Ivankin said.
SevSib is not the only railway projects related to the NSR that has been called into question due to a shortage of funds. In 2023, the Transport Ministry reported to the president that the construction of the Northern Latitudinal Railway needed to be postponed until 2027-2031, in which case its cost was estimated at 730 billion rubles. The NLR was supposed to carry 23.9 million tonnes of freight per year. The project involves building a link between the Northern and Sverdlovsk railways with 700 km of rail lines from Salekhard to Nadym, with a bridge across the Ob River.
Far East Development Minister Alexei Chekunkov said in October 2025 that there is no money in the budget for the NLR project in the next three years. A decision on the railway's construction might be made within a year, he said.
