More than 20,700 freight wagons are queueing for Ukraine’s western rail border crossings. Only 837 of them are actually at the border. To stop the backlog growing, Ukrainian Railways (UZ) will return to monthly planning and quotas in November.
As of 23 October, 20,718 wagons were heading for the western border, according to UZ. On average, a wagon waited 19 days to be handed over to a neighbouring rail operator. This has grown to 32 days at Batiovo on the Hungarian border.
| Destination | Wagons | |
|---|---|---|
| Poland | 9,514 | |
| Slovakia | 5,766 | |
| Hungary | 2,484 | |
| Moldova | 1,743 | |
| Romania | 1,211 |
Source: UZ
“This is not a queue at the border in the conventional sense. The wagons get stuck well before they even reach it,” Iryna Kosse, senior research fellow at the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting (IER), wrote on Telegram.
Ore is wanted, but not arriving
According to Kosse, nearly half of the queue is carrying ore, and another 3,570 wagons are carrying grain. Demand does not seem to be the issue. PKP LHS is ready to accept six to seven trains per day for ArcelorMittal, and a Slovak rail operator has warned that a steelmaking customer may switch to Brazilian ore shipped through Polish ports.
The crossings are also running below their agreed capacity. Mostyska–Medyka hands over three to four trains per track per day against an agreed six. Izov manages seven to eight against 10–12, and Yahodyn also falls short of its planned volume.
Three levels of bottlenecks
Kosse sees three levels of problems. The first and biggest is getting wagons to the border: air raids and strikes on substations and locomotives halt traffic, and Ukraine‘s western Zakarpattia region is short of locomotives and crews. The second is the crossing itself, where alerts suspend customs checks on both sides of the Polish border and empty wagons block tracks. The third one lies abroad, including a Constanța terminal that has stopped accepting trains and repairs on the Romanian network.
On top of this, demand exceeds the border’s capacity. Recently loaded wagons immediately join a 19-day queue.
Quotas return in Ukraine
In response to the problems, UZ is reintroducing monthly planning and quotas in November, similar to the system it used in 2022. It will only approve volumes that foreign operators and crossings can actually handle, based on the previous month’s handovers and existing queues. Operators with long queues or missed targets risk allocation cuts and possibly reassignments to others.
In parallel, the government has launched a pilot giving priority to vegetable oil and imported fuel. With only 613 oil wagons in the queue, Kosse expects little impact on grain and ore, though the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council has opposed the move.
Kosse considers quotas unavoidable, but notes they will stop the queue from growing without speeding up deliveries. “Without clear rules, monthly planning risks turning into the manual distribution of a scarce resource,” she warned, calling for public criteria on how quotas are calculated and how unused capacity is reallocated.