Russian Railways will invest 2 billion Euros (150 billion Rubles) in digitalisation by 2025. This plan was announced by the company’s CEO Oleg Belozyorov at the ongoing 12th International Forum Transport of Russia.

“The amount we would like to invest in the field of digitalisation until 2025, is about 150 billion Rubles,” said the chairman of Russian Railways. According to him, digitalisation is a key direction for the company’s development. Russian Railways plans to implement several projects in this area, inter alia, to increase the number of electronic tickets for long-distance trains by 70 per cent and the share of freight volumes registered in electronic form by 75 per cent.

Current projects

Russian Railways is already working on several projects in the field of digitalisation. By the year’s end, eight railway stations will be equipped with smart passenger information systems. The innovation automatically gathers information about traffic and informs passengers about train arrivals. The system improves the quality of service for passengers and has already been installed at forty railway stations, the company explained.

In addition, Russian Railways is implementing the project ‘Innovative Mobility’, which combines a wide variety of electronic services for passengers, including travel planning support, booking and sale of all types of tickets for multi-modal travels, and others.

Meanwhile, Russian Railways has already implemented the electronic trading platform ‘Freight Transportation’. This project was launched in 2017. Now, it has more than 3.2 thousand registered customers that make around 15-20 thousand shipments every month via the platform. At the beginning of October, Russian Railways signed an agreement with Freight Village Kaluga on launching the project “Digital Container Terminal”, which provides automatisation and implementation of IT-solutions in container transportation.