Interview with Mr.Robert Vuga, the first man of Cargo 10 Alliance

...if the Corridor V is in a way limited, we have to see what we have on the Corridor X. Just one data to illustrate its capacity: in 1988 the traffic on Corridor X through the border station Dobova was 8 million tones, last year it was 1.9 million tones. It means the capacity is there. Then you search for a potential: from around 60 millions tones of cargo between Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia only 10% is bilateral, the rest is transit and the market share of the rail is around 15% in total. If we move further and we think about all the traffic between for example Munich and Istanbul, only 2-6% is the market share of rail transport. It means there is a huge potential to grow.

Why is it not growing?

If we see what the corridor IV is doing, we can see the number of trains connecting Munich and Istanbul, it makes 90% of the whole train traffic and corridor X is making only 10%. Then you have to ask what I am doing wrong if I have 900 km shorter corridor but still I have 10% of the traffic. There are two major reasons. One is the fact that through Corridor IV to reach Turkey you don't have to leave EU – there is only one border. If you go through Slovenia you have three borders plus Turkish one. That is first obstacle, because the customs processes are long on those borders (see CREAM project statistics below). The second reason is, and again we need to face facts and be critical toward ourselves, the organization of our production is not efficient enough.
We can see the potential, in theory we have capacities but actually only the Corridor X is where we can grow significantly even without making some major improvements in our infrastructure. We can organize traffic through Slovenian border even in 10 minutes but if on the other side of the border things do not function on the same manner then merely we have just not done our homework. So then we have two alternative options... the full text will be available soon in upcoming issue of Railway Market Magazine 04/2010