At the end of last week, Railways Minister Gennady Fadeyev attended an international conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, dedicated to the development of the Trans-Siberian railway as a freight route.

At the conference, Fadeyev outlined his hopes for the transportation of freight along the Trans-Siberian. He said that the goal of a 25 percent increase in the volume of goods moved along the railway by 2003 is "entirely realistic."

According to the Railways Ministry, 1.5 billion rubles will be invested in the modernization of the longest railroad on the planet.

This event follows Fadeyev's visit last week to North Korea where he discussed plans to link both Pyongyang and Seoul to Europe via the Trans-Siberian railway.

This link would create an overland route for freight transport from Asia to Europe, currently dominated by ocean-going vessels and potentially a highly lucrative project for Russia.

On Nov. 11, for the first time in three years, train No. N 182 from Grozny arrived in Moscow at 11.30 a.m. It had come from the Chechen capital under the strictest security measures, said the Railways Ministry.

According to the ministry, the 12-wagon passenger train will travel to Moscow from Grozny and back once every six days. Ticket prices range from 500 to 2,000 rubles. It is expected that freight transport on this line will commence Nov. 14.

But while one train arrives, another fails to leave. The highly successful Nevsky Express service from Moscow to St. Petersburg was taken off the tracks at the end of October with promises from the Oktyabrskaya Railway Network (ORN), the operator of the line, that it would be back by Nov. 1.

However, that date has come and gone, and a replacement service, provided by a slower ER-200 electronic train, still trundles between the Russian capital and St. Petersburg.

According to the ORN, the thrice-weekly, five-hour express service has been postponed for an undetermined amount of time because of the lack of a certain production certificate. Ministry regulations say a service cannot run without this document.