The first test transport included 224 wagons, i.e., 15,000 tons of hard coal, but both parties are interested in long-term cooperation. For CTL Logistics, joint ventures mean even greater activity beyond the eastern border. To date, it is the only private carrier from Poland transporting cargo from Russia to EU countries. Apart from it, only PKP Cargo crosses the eastern border with entire trains. Other carriers deliver cargo to the border, from where the wagons are taken over by foreign companies. For the Belarusian partner, cooperation with CTL Logistics is an opportunity to generate additional transit traffic on Belarus’s main transport line. In the longer term, Belarusian Railways also plans to create new transport and logistics companies that will participate in the transshipment of goods near the Polish-Belarusian border.
– We have been cooperating with the Belarusian Railway for 5 years, and for a year we have been strengthening our cooperation. In Belarus, we have a company and a terminal in Bakuny, which provides transshipment services for coal, wood, and biomass transports, and also has the capacity to store them. The pilot batch of hard coal that we have just released is only a fraction of this terminal’s capabilities. We are working on transshipping 50,000 tons of goods per month, and we also have the capacity to store 150,000 tons of cargo – explains Jacek Bieczek, CEO of CTL Logistics.
The terminal in Bakuny (at the Kuźnica Białostocka/Bruzgi border crossing) with an area of 38 hectares is used for the transshipment and storage of goods imported from Russia. Russia exports primarily semi-finished products and raw materials to European Union countries, which are processed outside its borders and return in the form of finished chemical products, household appliances, etc. In the opposite direction, freight traffic is much more modest. On the other hand, CTL Logistics transports containers to Belarus via two lines it has launched. In addition to transport and transshipment, the CTL Logistics offer also provides cargo storage, which the partner from Belarus is unable to provide.
The BelPolLogistics company is a Polish-Belarusian joint venture established in 2009 to create a terminal for the transshipment and storage of goods. 50 percent of the company’s capital belongs to CTL Logistics. Since 2010, the company’s shareholders have been working on improving freight traffic on the east-west line and developing transshipments in Belarus.