40% of Moldova’s railways network is in damaged state and has speed restrictions. At the same time, practically the entire fleet of railway carriages of the enterprise Railway of Moldova (CFM) will reach their exploitation limit in 2025. The CFM director general, Oleg Tofilat, unveiled data on January 19.
“All maneuver locomotives are older than 40 years. Their state creates diverse problems as regards the reliability, costs of exploitation and efficiency of their use,” Oleg Tofilat said.
At the same time, in the case of most carriages for cereals, the exploitation term expires in 2024.
“We have 780 carriages for cereals; the exploitation term of 700 ones expires next year and of the others – in 2025. If we do not take measures, it is possible that we will not have carriages to export the cereals production, which poses risk for the economy,” Tofilat said.
According to him, CFM is set to buy 1,000 carriages for cereals, which are to be delivered till 2025. The new carriages will be financed through a loan worth 65 million euros on behalf of Poland’s government.
As for the employees’ salaries, Tofilat said that, since last summer, they had increased by 89 lei; the average salary presently reaches almost 8,000 lei (400 euros).
“In late May 2022, we managed to pay off all salary areas, which amounted to almost 150 million lei in the summer of 2021,” the CFM director general also said.
This year, the modernization of the railway infrastructure and of the rolling stock will be among the CFM’s priorities. Presently, the enterprises carried out more investment projects; one of them regards the rehabilitation of the transit corridor from northern Moldova up to the Danube ports – Giurgiulesti and Galati.
According to statistics, the overall volume of goods carried by CFM was of 1,232 million tons/km in 2022, up by 84% YoY. The total turnover is getting close to 1.3 billion lei (twice as much as in 2021). (Moldpres/Business World Magazine)