The fleet of high-speed vessels on the Volga-river will grow 3 times by the end of 2025
Source：Vedomosti
From：Taiwan Trade Center, Moscow
Update Time：2024/01/15
Regional shipping companies in 2024-2025 should receive 21 high-speed river vessels for transporting passengers along the Volga, said Deputy Minister of Transport of Russia Alexander Poshivay at Transport Week. Now Vodolet (Nizhny Novgorod Region), the Fleet of the Republic of Tatarstan and Cheboksary River Port (Chuvashia) have 11 such vessels.
Modern high–speed hydrofoil river vessels are the heirs of "Meteors", "Comets" and "Rockets" developed in the middle of the XX century. Some of them are still in operation on the Neva and Lake Ladoga. Modern analogues of such vessels are designed by the Gorky Zelenodolsk Plant (Tataria) and the Alekseev Central Design Bureau (Nizhny Novgorod).
The project for the development of high-speed river transportation by inland waterways provides for four stages of development. The first stage involves the authorities of Tatarstan, Chuvashia and Nizhny Novgorod region and shipping companies of these regions. It covers the development of routes from Gorodets to Ulyanovsk. By the fourth stage, the project should reach the Astrakhan region.
According to Poshivay, in 2024, shipping companies in three regions [of the first stage of the project] plan to transport 354,000 passengers, 150,000 of which will be in the Nizhny Novgorod region, 180,000 – in Tatarstan, and the remaining 24,000 – in Chuvashia. "In 2023, more than 75% of river transport passengers traveled to these regions for tourist purposes. Therefore, priority will be given to the development of tourist transportation on river highways," he explained.
At the beginning of 2023, the government approved a program to support shipbuilding using the funds of the NWF, the operator of which is the State Transport Leasing Company (STLC). In total, 260 ships are included in the program until 2027, of which 73 are passenger ships, a representative of the STLC explained to Vedomosti.
"This year we plan to contract 39 passenger vessels. Including 19 high-speed ones, contests for them were announced at the end of last week (November 6-12. – Vedomosti), the cost is about 8 billion rubles.", – said the interlocutor. Among them, 4 Meteors-2020, 9 Meteors-120 and 6 Valdaev-45R will be ordered.
Meteor 2020 is a project of the Gorky Zelenodolsk Plant. "Valdai-45R" and "Meteor–120" are projects of the Alekseev Central Design Bureau. The probability that other enterprises will win the contracts of GTLK tends to zero, since other plants simply will not be able to build them, says the interlocutor of Vedomosti in one of the design bureaus of St. Petersburg.
A source in one of the shipping companies says that the plans of the Ministry of Transport for the development of high-speed river transportation on the Volga and the plans of the STLC for the construction of high-speed passenger ships are not linked at the moment, but after a while they should be brought to a common denominator.
Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of Infoline-Analytics, believes that new high-speed river vessels will be in demand in the coming years both for the needs of the transportation business and due to the development of domestic tourism in Russia. In his opinion, international sanctions should not interfere with these projects. "These vessels have no critical problems with import dependence – local issues on import substitution of aggregates and components have been resolved," the expert believes.
Source: https://www.vedomosti.ru/business/articles/2023/11/17/1006291-flot-skorostnih-sudov-na-volge-virastet?utm_campaign=newspaper_17_11_2023&utm_medium=email&utm_source=vedomosti