Load on Russian railways drops 6.3% in January - source
MOSCOW. Feb 1 (Interfax) - The average daily load on the rail lines in Russia was 3.071 million tonnes last month, down a bit over 6% year-on-year, a source close to the operations of OJSC Russian Railways (RZD) told Interfax.
The total figure for the month was 95.189 million tonnes. RZD has said that the load was 101.6 million tonnes in January of last year, so the year-on-year decrease was 6.3%.
RZD confirmed these figures officially on Friday. The company said that the rail transport of oil and oil products was down 2.8% at 21.9 million tonnes, of construction materials 18.3% at 9.7 million tonnes, of iron and manganese ore 3.8% at 8.5 million tonnes, of ferrous metals 6.2% at 5.9 million tonnes, of chemical and mineral fertilizers 2.3% at 3.9 million tonnes, of timber 4.6% at 2.6 million tonnes, of chemicals and coda 6% at 2.3 million tonnes, of industrial raw and formed materials 18.3% at 2.1 million tonnes, of non-ferrous ores and raw sulphur 10.7% at 1.7 million tonnes, of cement also 10.7% at 1.6 million tonnes, of ferrous metal scrap 8.9% at 700,000 tonnes, and of grain 58% at 700,000 million tonnes.
Only shipments of bituminous coal and coke were up in January - 0.9% to 26.8 million tonnes and 0.6% to 1.03 million tonnes, respectively.
Total freight turnover was down 7.3% at 178.1 billion tonne-kilometers, and including empty miles - 7.9% at 226.7 billion t/km.