News

Saulius Vaičekauskas, Head of Services at LTG Cargo

Every summer, LTG Cargo prepares for a special period: together with grain growers and buyers, it monitors weather forecasts that determine the start and volume of the harvest, prepares its rolling stock and reviews its schedules. To give you an idea of why the grain season requires such extensive preparation, here are a few figures: last year, LTG Cargo transported a total of 24.4 million tonnes of freight, of which 2.5 million tonnes was grain. It is also important to note that we transport the vast majority of this volume in just a few months.

Much like last summer, this year’s grain season is starting a little later: we planned to begin transporting the new grain harvest from 20 July. Until then, from the start of summer, we were still transporting last year’s grain: this frees up storage facilities whilst we await the new harvest, and market demand is quite high ahead of the new season.

So, how is LTG Cargo preparing for this busy period? First of all, we are preparing and allocating wagons. There was a time when we used to borrow wagons from Belarus for grain transport during peak periods, but we have stopped doing so over the last few years and have managed to increase the turnover of our own wagons and transport our customers’ grain. For this season, we have prepared nearly 1,700 wagons for transporting this agricultural produce.

Last year, the fleet of wagons intended for grain transport was supplemented with new grain wagons specially manufactured for LTG Cargo in Ukraine, and this year will be the first season in which we will be able to put all 500 new wagons into service right from the start of the season. Customers already appreciated the advantages of the new wagons last year: greater capacity (able to carry up to 70 tonnes of grain), more convenient and faster loading, airtight hatches, and so on.

Secondly, we are planning and ordering capacity, and drawing up schedules. We have learnt some lessons here, so this year we will be trialling a few solutions. The grain season does, after all, mean a significant increase in freight volumes over a relatively short period on the main route to Klaipėda, so in previous years we experienced a ‘bottleneck’ effect at the major stations. To avoid this, this year we will try to bypass them; for example, we will form trains from wagons collected in surrounding regions, such as Alytus, Vilkaviškis and others, at Kazlų Rūda, and from Rokiškis, Kupiškis and others – at Panevėžys. We have previously trialled direct transport from Viduklė to Klaipėda – where the majority of the grain harvest is transported – and this solution has increased wagon turnover several-fold.

In order to provide our customers with a faster service – which is what is most needed in this case – we must address, and are addressing, yet another challenge: the speed at which empty wagons are returned. We transport loaded wagons to their final destination efficiently; it would seem, what else is missing? However, returning empty wagons more quickly would further improve wagon turnover, meaning that customers’ cargo would be delivered even faster – so we will be devoting more attention to this process as well.

We expect that this year, the peak for transporting the new grain harvest will be reached in August. Both last year and the year before, we set monthly records for the volume of this cargo transported. However, when providing a service, it is not only the volume we can transport that matters, but also meeting our customers’ expectations. We will therefore continue the regular meetings with clients that we began in previous years – we feel that these meetings allow us to get

to know one another better, listen to each other’s needs, and improve as a logistics partner, so that this special season runs smoothly and successfully for our clients.