Intercity+ and Intercity high-speed trains transported 3,807,000 passengers in 2016, which is 22.6% or 702,000 more than they transported in 2015. The occupancy of the trains increased by 16 percentage points to 84% during the year, the Ukrainian Railways public joint-stock company (Ukrzaliznytsia) announced.
The high-speed trains performed more than 4,000 trips in 2016. The most popular destination was Kharkiv (1.154 million passengers). They also transported 1.012 million passengers to and from Dnipro, 635,000 passengers to and from Lviv, and 378,000 passengers to and from Odesa.
According to Ukrzaliznytsia, Intercity+ and Intercity high-speed trains have transported 11.7 million passengers since they started operation in May 2012 to the present time.
Ukrzaliznytsia will continue to develop the network of high-speed trains in Ukraine in 2017. It plans to increase the number of trains on the existing routes and introduce new routes.
In particular, it will launch the fourth pair of trains on the Kyiv-Lviv route and the fifth pair on the Kyiv-Kharkiv route. Among the new routes being considered are Odesa-Dnipro, Odesa-Lviv, and extension of Kyiv-Zaporizhia route to Melitopol.
The company is also considering the possibility of expanding the network to Europe in the future.
Ukrzaliznytsia launched a new international train (the Kyiv-Przemysl train) for the first time in a long time in 2016. In November 2016, the operation of a high-speed train to Kryvyi Rih was restored following the repair of a double-decker Skoda train and a Kharkiv-Kyiv-Vinnytsia route was introduced.
