December 25, 2024:
Russia’s ability to continue the Ukraine war is being compromised due to catastrophic mismanagement of its railway system. This emerging situation is so dire that cutoffs of service to vast areas, starting with Siberia east of Irkutsk to the Bering Sea and Sea of Okhotsk, to save the rest of Russia next year may happen next year. Russian railways account for about 43 percent of all transportation in Russia, and most of its east-west transport. The present rate of loss of rail cars and engines to worn-out axle bearings is so bad that that the Russian economy may come to a standstill and collapse in 1-2 years. One of the key issues here is rail transport of coal, which is declining fast but essential for electric power production.
Running trains with worn-out axle bearings causes them to derail and damage tracks such that movement of trains with effective bearings is not possible until the wrecks are cleared and the rail beds are repaired. Such accidents have recently become significant problems.
The degree of this problem is clouded because the Russian army has taken scores of thousands, perhaps more than a hundred thousand, rail cars out of service for use as storage of their cargos. It takes time and manpower to both unload them for local storage and then reload them for local transport. It’s faster and takes less manpower to unload the rail cars once, directly from the rail cars onto trucks for local delivery. Plus the Ukrainians keep blowing up the unloaded cargo sites. The Russian army has no use for rail coal cars so the decline in rail transport of coal is a good proxy for the proportion of rail cars out of service due to worn-out axle bearings. It is difficult to distinguish rail cars deadlined for worn-out bearings from those with adequate bearings which the Russian army has deadlined as storage for their cargos. Plus there is probably some to considerable overlap between the two.
The rail bearing problem arose for two reasons. The first was termination about 35 years ago of the old Soviet apprenticeship system of training manual labor specialists like rail axle bearing repackers, without creation of a new training system. This resulted in the age cohort of workers able to repack the old-style rail axle bearings aging out to the point that 90% are gone. This was not seen as a problem because the Russians planned on converting all their rail engines and rail cars to the new system of rail axle coil bearings around 2030 when the last bearing repackers retire. This didn’t happen because of Western sanctions for the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. All modern rail axle coil bearings are produced in NATO countries. China produces its own rail axle coil bearings, but those aren’t anywhere near as good as Western ones, and China hasn’t sold any to Russia because of the sanctions. The Western coil bearings the Russians bought prior to 2022 are starting to wear out and the old bearings which require repacking have increasingly few personnel capable of doing that.
It is not possible for Russia to simply import rail cars from elsewhere because of the unique Russian rail gauge, which is wider than that of all other countries save other former “Republics” of the old Soviet Union, all of whom Russia has promised to conquer next if it wins the Ukraine war.
Fixing this problem will take many years even if the war ends immediately and will actually grow increasingly worse for several years before the collapse levels off. Onset of horrific mass starvation with mass refugee flows is likely after three years and would involve the 75 million population “Stans” (Central Asia) in addition to Russia. Nothing is being done because Putin doesn’t want to hear about it.
The long-range implications of a Russian railway collapse are worse. Few of the many millions who successfully flee to countries with food will ever return. Russia’s oil and gas exports will cease due to lack of maintenance on the pipelines conveying those to the West.