INVESTORS are considering plans to extend the Pacific Railway, Russia’s first modern private railway, to serve the Tunguss coal basin in Siberia, according to Dmitry Demeshin, the governor of Khabarovsk Krai in the far east of the country.
The 531km Pacific Railway is being built by mining company Elga at a cost of Roubles 147bn ($US 1.76bn). It will connect the mine at Elga in the Sakha Republic, which with reserves of 2.1 billion tonnes of coking coal is one of the largest in the world, with an export terminal at Port Elga on the Sea of Okhotsk.
Construction was officially launched on September 4 with a ceremony attended online by the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin.
Forming the third main line to serve the far east of Russia, alongside the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Baikal - Amur main line, the Pacific Railway is expected to carry 30 million tonnes of freight next year, according to Elga. Until the end of this year, the railway will operate in trial mode.
In parallel, work continues on the railway's second branch, which is expected to increase capacity to 50 million tonnes a year. And as Demeshin told Russian state news outlet Interfax, plans are already in motion to extend the railway further westwards.
“In this way, we will connect the three largest Russian regions and the railway will run from the Krasnoyarsk Krai all the way to the Pacific Ocean,” Demeshin says.
Although the new railway is designed for Elga export coal traffic, it is of strategic importance to the entire Russian economy, as it is expected to relieve both the Baikal - Amur main line and Trans-Siberian Railway.
Over the last three years, the eastern part of the Russian Railways (RZD) network has been struggling to cope with a sharp increase in freight traffic, reflecting the growing need for Russian producers to gain access to the markets of the Asia-Pacific region for goods previously exported to western markets.
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