Southern congestion
Novorossiysk Commercial Sea Port (NCSP Group) intends to considerably increase the number of wagons unloaded per day during this May due to a higher volume of grain, ore, ferrous metal and oil products being delivered to the port and causing an enormous congestion of over 60 trains at the railway approaches.
A real congestion has accumulated near port Novorossiysk. As PortNews IAA learnt from North-Caucasus Railway (branch of Russian Railways OJSC) there were 35 trains with grain, 12 with ore, 10 with ferrous metal and 6 with oil products as of April 30. One day before there were “only” 48 trains.
Sources close to Russian Railways blame the situation on Novorossiysk Commercial Sea Port, the companies of which, especially Novorossiysk Grain Terminal confirm their readiness to accept volumes exceeding actual capacity.
As PortNews IAA was told by NCSP Group, Novorossiysk Grain Terminal fulfils all obligations to the railway and customers though “working flat out” and handling over 200 wagons per day with an average norm of 167 railway wagons.
To manage this cargo flow, NCSP OJSC additionally accepts 69 wagons with grain (with the norm of 30 wagons). The Group plans to unload 320 wagons with ferrous metal per day during May 2009. Average daily delivery to Novorossiysk station in April 2009 was 288 wagons successfully handled by the port.
As of today average daily unloading of NCSP is 611 wagons with the norm of 596.
“NCSP now works according to the plan and intends to continue handling cargo delivered to the port,” the company confirms.
However NCSP neither proves nor denies that volumes confirmed by them correspond to the port’s actual capacity.
It should be noted that among the factors influencing the growth of grain transshipment via Russian ports there are decreased transportation tariffs in Russia which stimulate export via national facilities. Against new preferential tariffs, agricultural producers have already obtained a discount of a railway tariff for transportation of grain and milling industry products. A decreasing coefficient 0.5 for distances from 1,100 km is in force from the year beginning. According to Russian Railways, railway tariff for grain export via Russian ports with average distance of 624 km fell by almost 20% (from $15.9 to $13 per tonne) from December 2008. Read more about this issue in Relevant Topic of PortNews IAA website dated March 12.
So we can suppose this situation is caused by the general economic situation and will last until it is changed or transport infrastructure is optimized to conform it.