“Serbian Railways” and Rail Cargo Group, which includes companies for railway freight traffic of Austria and Hungary, have common interest in increasing the freight traffic between our country and these countries. In this way, the railway can over take great amounts of freight for transportation on this route from road transportation system and the number of freight trains operating through Serbia on Corridor 10 would be increased.
Determination of “Serbian Railways” to intensify modernization of Corridor 10 in the next period will also contribute to competitiveness regarding Corridor 4 across Romania and Bulgaria. In this regard the initiative to include combined freight trains through Serbia on the route Šopron (Hungary) – Istanbul (Turkey) was started today as a joint project of Serbian, Austrian and Hungarian railway administrations on borders in order to decrease, as much as possible, non operating time of trains.
This was concluded today during the meeting which was held in Belgrade by Director General of “Serbian Railways” Dragoljub Simonović, with Rail Cargo Group Director Arnold Schiefer, who was representing company delegation for freight railway traffic for Austrian and Hungarian railways.
On that occasion it was emphasized that the current volume of operation reciprocally realized in the freight traffic is between 600 and 700 thousand tons of transported freight with the maximum of two thousand pairs of freight trains and with the value of work between EUR 9 and 10 million. As it was pointed out in the meeting, the goal is to increase the volume of transportation on an annual level on approx. 1,5 million of freight tons and almost EUR 15 to 16 million. And to achieve that a competitive transport offer is necessary on this railway route as per quality of the service and price as well as per time of travel.
Administration of Serbian Railways announced that modernization of Corridor 10 will create conditions to enter into market competition with alternative Corridor 4 and that the common interest is to return common railway freight traffic on the level which it had couple of years ago, when almost five thousand of freight train pairs operated per year on this route.
Representatives of Austrian railway freight traffic company (Rail Cargo Austria) announced bigger number of intermodal trains from Germany to Šopron in Hungary and further to Instanbul in the next period.
During the meeting it was discussed about regulation of common financial obligations and organizational reforms conducted by Serbian Railways, in which Austrian partners offered their professional help based on their own experiances, especially regarding the infrastructure, passenger and freight railway traffic, what has allready been done in this country in 2002.
