By the end of the year, Ukrzaliznytsia’s fleet of grain hopper cars will shrink threefold

Ukrzaliznytsia’s active fleet of grain hopper wagons has shrunk from 3,000 in December 2025 to 2,600, and by the end of the year only about 800 grain wagons will remain in service.

This is reported by CTS.

The working fleet of grain wagons operated by the Transport Logistics Center branch of Ukrzaliznytsia (UZ) fell from 3,000 units in December 2025 to 2,600 as of March 5, the branch head Ihor Trybis said.

According to him, almost 200 more wagons will be withdrawn from service in March, and roughly the same number in April. After that, the pace of reduction may increase.

“For the next season, the fleet will have 1,500, at most 1,700 wagons left, and by the end of the year about 800 grain wagons,” Trybis noted.

This is linked to wagons reaching the end of their service life: the branch will carry out repairs only if long-term contracts are signed.

“To maintain the fleet, we need to sign long-term contracts so that we understand the situation not for 1–2 months, but long-term through the end of the year, and prices that allow us to perform these repairs,” he said.

“Repairing a wagon for two months, spending 200,000 hryvnias to earn 100,000—that’s not exactly great economics,” the branch head explained.

UZ Deputy Director of the Department of Transportation Technology and Commercial Operations Valerii Tkachev added that the reduction will affect not only the CTL fleet but also private wagons, due to high repair costs.

At the same time, he said that an around 1,500 UAH (€30) per-wagon rental rate is acceptable for the market: under such conditions, total logistics over a distance of about 700 km would not exceed $17–18 per ton.

Earlier, it was reported that Ukraine confiscated 1,592 wagons belonging to Russia that had been used for commercial freight transport. They are in working condition and can be used for cargo transport until the end of their service life.

It was also reported earlier that Ukrzaliznytsia wants to reach an agreement with the government on indexing rail-transport tariffs and raising the tariff for grain transportation.

Previously, UZ’s wagon-repair enterprises said they expect to end this year with losses of 600 million hryvnias (about €11.77 million), citing declining rail freight volumes and a surplus of freight wagons on the market.