Thread by @Prune602

Thread:

‼️ Russian Railways Loading is in decline

It’s worse than during 2020 and it’s likely worse than you might think.

Let me explain…

First thing I want to point out is that the main driver of the decline now is

👉 Russian Railways

Nothing else.

Because there is no excess rail capacity. Russian Railways is over extended. Everyone wants more shipping availability and they can’t get it.

So even if production begins to drop and/or there are issues with cross border payments, that’s not the driving force.

Next, it’s important that the MIX of shipping has been relatively stable for some time.

Here is the end of year total distribution BY WEIGHT of loading for Russian railways. For 2020, 2021, 2022, & 2023.

As you can see the mix doesn’t vary significantly overall

Here is the YTD mix for the end of July 2024.

Other some reductions in coal there really isn’t that much of a change.

Russian Railways publishes data in year to date format (YTD). These means that, for example, May 2024, would be the total loading for from January 1 2024 until the end of May 2024.

I have compiled the data into this chart. The values are in MILLIONS of tons.

This next part I want you to think of like how you would calculate your overall grade for a class in school.

You would take your total number of points earned and divide it by the number of points available to learn what your total score is.

And each grading period you get a grade on your report card to tell you how you’re doing towards the end goal.

Same thing with what we’re going to next. Because, usually if something goes wrong (maybe a late assignment) you might be able to “catch up” later.

We also need to account for the extra day during leap years. And for the fact that some months have more days than others.

So we need to divide out our other chart by the number of days that have occurred (this chart) to get a

👉 rolling daily average LOADING.

The left chart (that’s in millions of tons) is divided by the right chart (days)

That’s what will give us our graph.

And here we are. Russian Railways rolling daily average loading in Millions of tons. As you can see things are getting significantly worse.

Note: This is the first July over that whole period where loading DECREASED, normally it increases in July.

Russian Railways CAN’T “catch up” because there isn’t extra capacity available.

Railways are Russia’s backbone, there are many places where rail is the ONLY option. Switching to trucks isn’t really an option (plus there’s a shortage of drivers there)

So what happens to an economy if you can’t get your goods to market?

https://twitter.com/prune602/status/1793771616117129510

Here is the Monthly Loading in Millions of tons (not YTD) so you can more easily see the decrease in loading in July 2024.

Every of their year in the period, loading increased.

It will get worse

@AmerigoWatson Based on the weight of a T-72 that’s like less than 6000 tons total, for the month.

Divide that by 30 to get a rough daily loading and you get 200 tons daily.

The chart is in MILLIONS of tons.

So orders of magnitude, I think insignificant

@AmerigoWatson And they’ve sending electric scooters now, not heavy equipment 😂, in that situation, you’d expect the loading to improve now, not get worse.

@stoicfaux That’s Thermal Coal (not the coking stuff)

@JohnAnd79883403 And the difference would still be the same. My point all along has been that Russian Railways was not only overextended, but that its capacity was actually shrinking.

I’ve written several threads about it.

@JohnAnd79883403 Here is where you can trace back to the beginning.

https://twitter.com/prune602/status/1793362126775480391

@Zula20234 And since a big part of the problem is that backlog on repairs, simply damaging them enough to need to be repaired before operating them again is probably enough to cause significant problems

@WithoutPaging To begin with, they are struggling to schedule locomotives with their system to begin with. Their system may say that there is a locomotive available, but it’s isn’t actually available, often because their system cannot accurately predict how long locomotive repairs take.

@WithoutPaging On top of that, every time they ban the export of gasoline OR UN-ban the export of gasoline, it messes with the whole logistics system 😂. They’ve complained about,

Plus there’s traffic jams when heading into the far east. It’s a big giant mess!

@MalcontentmentT Now about half of the fleet is over 20 years old and parts are find. They had a whole meeting about getting Russian Railways to understand that old locomotives take longer to repair than new ones. This creating an increasingly long back log for a limited number of personnel.

@MalcontentmentT They cannot tell if a locomotive is available or not. Add in problems like:

- Refineries getting hit (so Russian Railways has to start moving stuff in other directions)

- The change from shipping West to East (where there no enough railway capacity thus there is a traffic jam)

@MalcontentmentT - And the government keeps changing things. For example, Russian Railways has complained every time they put that gasoline export ban in place (or removes it) because they have to redo all of the planning and it causes a mess.

All of these things add up.

@RenounceReuse The other problem is that Russian Railways won’t let you see them without VPN now. So you either need that, or a workaround to get it from them. You can also get it from some publications

@RenounceReuse But here is an example

interfax.ru/business/973497