OREANDA-NEWS. May 16, 2012. Vladimir Yakunin, President of Russian Railways, took part in the International Transport Forum held between 2 and 4 May 2012 in the Germany city of Leipzig. The motto of the Forum this year was "Effective Transport Integration: Providing Connections", reported the press-centre of RZD.

Yakunin spoke at a Forum session on "Investing in Connections: Where, Why, When And How?"

In his address to the Forum, Yakunin said that transport, energy and communications were the areas which required priority attention and were the basis for developing and improving the efficiency of the other sectors of the economy.

Yakunin also noted, however, that so far, Russia had not sufficiently realised the potential to develop the country’s transport infrastructure. The priorities here, according to Yakunin, should be linking the development plans for all types of transport, both within Russia and in neighboring countries, and the construction of rail and transfer hubs.

Russian Railways therefore pays particular attention to establishing mutually beneficial conditions for the joint implementation of integrated transport supply and delivery chains based on the economically justified distribution of income and profits between all participants.

In cooperation with maritime transport, the Company is developing combined ferry services on the routes between Ust-Luga - Baltiisk - Sassnitz (Germany), Caucasus - Samsun (Turkey) and Kavkaz - Poti (Georgia).

Russian Railways is also making considerable efforts to coordinate transport cooperation within the country. The Company has developed a concept for the location of terminal and logistics centres to cover Russia’s entire territory and which establishes services on the busiest stretches and junctions with roads and sea transport routes.

In preparation for the APEC Summit to be held later this year on the island of Russky in the Far East, Russian Railways is completing a project to construct new and reconstruct the existing railway infrastructure to make it suitable for intermodal passenger transportation between Vladivostok – and Knevichi Airport.

Yakunin stressed that the infrastructure projects now under construction in preparation for the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 are strategically important to the Company, in particular the organisation of intermodal transport between Sochi - Adler - Airport with the construction of a new 2.8 km railway line and the construction of a 48 km combined road and rail route between Adler and the Alpika-Service mountain resort.

In closing his speech, Yakunin once again focused on the major aspects of the session’s topic and spoke of the need to invest in the balanced development of transport infrastructure, transport hubs and logistics centres - and that it was essential to do this today. The government, regions and private business could all become investors working in full partnership with each other.