“During the last 26 year, Romanian railway infrastructure is at an ongoing degradation that has a major impact on transport safety and on country’s GDP. This is the result of Romania’s political decision that were in conflict with national interest and EU’s policy. So, at EU level, it was decided to develop the railway transport by attracting freight flows from road transport to railways, in Romania it was happened the opposite. Thus, the railway transport significantly lost its share. A good example of this kind of measure is railways’ track access charges. In Romania, the TAC is 20 times bigger than the road transport charges that involve a charge per year. In railway transport, the track access charge is paid for each km, no matter that is a freight transport, or an empty locomotive that is moved. In addition, if a wagon is stationary, it is charged by EUR 0.20 per hour and, as an example, in Hungary, it is charged by EUR 0.40 per day per wagon,” Valentin Dorobantu, the President of Romanian Private Railway Companies’ Organisation said, during the Railway Pro Technology and Services Forum, organised by Railway PRO, Club Feroviar and the Romanian Railway Industry Association (AIF) in April 2017.
Last year, rail freight operators could only take 60% of the transport orders, because the traffic restrictions on the railway infrastructure, especially to Constanta Port. “It is not possible that trains have to wait 2-4 days only because the bottleneck on the network. As an example, there are the trains that transport grains: the average journey time was 3 times bigger than the normal. As the average travel time is increasing, the clients ordered trucks for their goods transport to the Port. This is the same situation happened in Curtici railway station (western Romania). “The railway infrastructure modernisation project took 5 years and during these years, for border transit the trains need to wait 2-3 days, without having the possibility to draw back the locomotives and the employees. All these bottlenecks lead to a 30% increase in remuneration. In this situation, can we talk about an increase of the productivity, or of the rail freight transport input to GDP?” Dorobantu said.
Within 2017 national budget, the investment in the Romanian railway infrastructure is not a priority. Every year 370 km of the lines are losing the warranty and the financing is assured from the budget only for 15 km of railway per year. The EU’s funds are allotted to the modernisation or other projects on European Corridors.
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