OREANDA-NEWS. Starting on 20 April, Moscow will host the XXIV meeting of the General Directors’ Conference of the Organization for Railway Cooperation (OSJD), reported the press-centre of Russian Railways.

The Conference will be attended by Vladimir Yakunin, President of Russian Railways, Tadeusz Szozda, Chairman of the OSJC Committee, railway managers from OSJD member countries and observers, including Frederic Parde, Vice President of SNCF International (French National Railway), and Tapio Simos, Executive Director of VR Finnish Railway.

“The main task of the Conference is to frame a set of up-to-date solutions to strengthen international links in the sphere of cargo and passenger transportation. Life is changing, and the documents regulating cargo and passenger flows across the Eurasian continent need to be amended accordingly,” said Vadim Morozov.

In order to make rail transport more competitive, the OSJC has developed a new line of strategy to improve rail communications between Europe and Asia. This is presented as the OSJD’s central objective in its new main documents.
 
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The OSJD is an international organization created at a meeting of railway transport ministers on 28 June, 1956, in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The chief aims of the OSJD are to develop international cargo and passenger transportation, create a single rail transport space in the Eurasian region, improve the competitiveness of transcontinental rail links, and also facilitate technical progress and scientific cooperation in the area of rail transport.

The OSJD consists of 27 countries: Azerbaijan, Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Hungary, Vietnam, Georgia, Iran, Kazakhstan, China, North Korea, Cuba, Kirgizstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Estonia. Also in attendance were observers from Germany (DB AG), France (SNCF), Greece (OCE), Finland (VR), Serbia (ZS) and Gyor-Sopron-Ebenfurt Railway (GySEV).

Rail communications between OSJD member countries are characterized by distances of 8-10,000 km through diverse climatic zones, some of which are very severe. Trains crossing the network in one direction are modified twice to accommodate the different track gauges (1435 mm – 1520 mm – 1435 mm). The total length of track in use across all the countries’ railways when the OSJD was set up came to around 227,000 km. It now exceeds 276,000 km, along which nearly 5 billion tonnes of cargo and 3.5 billion passengers are conveyed each year.