Moscow news
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05-Aug-2009
Night train no more
Catching the night train to St. Petersburg could soon be a thing of the past for business travellers with the introduction of a new Siemens-built train that eats up the distance from Moscow in less than four hours.
Russian Railways' new Sapsan locomotive, which will reach speeds of up to 250 kilometres an hour, is a spot of good news for the state corporation, which has been faced with a drop in demand and falling profits.
"It is important ...to finish this project," said Nadezhda Tikhomova, a transportation analyst at Metropol. "It is half done. They just need to buy the trains now."
Russian Railways, or RZD, has ordered eight of the high-speed trains from German engineering giant Siemens at a cost of $850 million. In Spain, the same trains have recorded speeds of over 400 kilometres per hour.
The trains will be able to cover the 645 kilometres to St. Petersburg in 3 hours 45 minutes when fully commissioned, surpassing the fastest service currently on offer, which is 4 1/2 hours.
"Sapsan has become a symbol of everything new and progressive," RZD chief Vladimir Yakunin said in a statement posted on the company's web site. "The train changes the shape of domestic railroad transport."
On July 30, a test run of the route was completed, making an extra stop in Lyuban to lay flowers on the grave of Tsarist Russia's first railway minister, Pavel Melnikov.
Air conditioning and comfortable seats in the railcars make a welcome change from some of the railway's older wagons and Internet access is available in business class. Some 80 per cent of the existing wagons are worn out, according to RZD.
The high speed trains are likely to be put into operation in December, with other facilities added next year.
While the capital expenditure is already in place for the project, RZD has announced that spending will be cut this year by more than 34 per cent to about 250 billion roubles ($8 billion) as federal budget funding has dried up.
In RZD's most profitable activity, transporting freight, volumes have so far fallen 23 per cent, with a predicted decrease of 19 per cent for the whole year.
"I think there will be no further cuts this year, but next year there are likely to be cuts because the government is unlikely to give them the 11.5 per cent [fare increases] they asked for," said Tikhomova.
RZD posted a loss of 17.1 billion roubles ($546 million) in the first quarter. The state corporation received a $500 million loan over 10 years from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
In addition to the loan, RZD have proposed leasing out some of their tracks in a bid to generate extra cash. It is thought this could interest companies near the lines looking for storage space and would aid track maintenance.
Siemens has also signed a 320 million euro ($450 million) contract with RZD and the Tver Wagon Building Plant to build 200 sleeper cars to replace some of the outdated fleet over the next five years. This would take the total deals up to approximately $1.27 billion.
There are also plans to expand the high-speed service on other routes. The Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod service is planned to start in April 2010, and the Moscow-St. Petersburg service will later be extended as far as Helsinki.
The Moscow News