The Ukrainian Railways public joint-stock company (Ukrzaliznytsia) plans to spend UAH 7 billion on reconstruction and modernization of railway infrastructure in 2018.
The company’s acting head Yevhen Kravtsov announced this at the opening of the Railway Infrastructure Center on December 15, the CFTS correspondent reports.
"In general, we plan to allocate about UAH 22 billion for capital investments. Out of this amount, we will spend about UAH 7 billion on repair and reconstruction of infrastructure. This is a significant figure, especially compared with previous years," Kravtsov said.
According to the head of Ukrzaliznytsia, the main task is to remove the limitations on major railways, bring the speed of trains to the declared figure, as well as increase it.
As the CFTS previously reported, Ukrzaliznytsia intends to increase the average speed of trains by 1.5 km/h or 3% next year.
Ukrzaliznytsia plans to achieve this speed increase by replacing 127 track switches, strengthening 14 kilometers of curved sections of tracks, speeding up repairs of rail tracks, and repairing an additional 110 kilometers of rail tracks this year.
The company’s plans for 2018 include reconstruction of 300 kilometers of tracks on the Kyiv-Odesa and Kyiv-Lviv routes and upgrade of 309 track switches.
Kravtsov said at the beginning of this year, when he was the company’s supervisory board chairman, that the company planned to make provisions for funds for financing infrastructure upgrade in its financial plans from 2018 with the aim of increasing the speed of trains, particularly high-speed trains. He said at the time that the infrastructure on the most popular routes would be upgraded comprehensively from 2018 to increase the speed of trains to 180-200 km/h.
