YEREVAN, OCTOBER 11, NOYAN TAPAN. Armenia attaches importance to the development of means of transport and is ready for a constructive dialog on this issue. This is said in the message of the Armenian President Robert Kocharian that was read during the opening ceremony of the 44th meeting of the Council of Railways of CIS countries and Baltic states on October 11. The delegations of the railway council management of Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, as well as Bulgaria and Finland are participating in the three-day meeting. Representatives of Azerbaijan were not present at the opening ceremony. Presenting the results of operating the railway networks in the first nine months of 2006, Chairman of Russian Railways OJSC Vladimir Yakunin said that these results show that the upward tendency in goods transportation is continuing. According to him, in the period under review, the total volume of goods transportation made 1.6 bln tons, which exceeds by 2.2% the envisaged index. Cement, coal, oil and oil products account for a large share of transported goods. V. Yakunin said that the passenger transportation also increased. At the same time, there was no noticable improvement regarding the timetables of international trains. In his words, there remains the problem of completing the trains with new carriages. The quality of imported carriages is low: for example, the operation period of some goods wagons is currently 22.8 years instead of the required 28 years.

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