The Government wants to start to solve, later this year, the problem of underuse and neglect of almost 65% of the national rail network which is in the hands of private enterprise. The National Land Transport Agency (Agência Nacional de Transportes Terrestres – ANTT) will, in March, be launching a new directive that will establish a time frame so that the concessionaires may either establish plans for recovery or return the sections concerned. “The concessionaires will have a time frame in which to recover or return the stretch. In the case of return, we will discuss possible compensation where applicable, but what is under concession must be in operating conditions”, said the Director-General of the ANTT, Bernardo Figueiredo.
This proposal is part of a package of measures which the agency has discussed with the industry to try to sort out bottlenecks – such as the lack of investments – before the issue of the new regulatory benchmark, which has been stopped since last year.
According to the agency, 28 thousand kilometers of railroad tracks were transferred from Government ownership to private enterprise in the 1990s. Out of this total, only 10 thousand kilometers are adequately used. “Another 10 thousand kilometers are underused and 8 thousand are abandoned”, said Mr. Figueiredo. “There are some stretches where not even the tracks or the sleepers remain.”
The possibility of returning stretches of railroad was already raised in the Contracts. Indeed, railroad transport behemoth América Latina Logística (ALL), which is one of the four megacompanies in this segment, in September agreed to return to the Federal Government four sections of the Northern Brazil Railroad (Ferrovia Norte Brasil – Ferronorte) that would be constructed to improve the shipment of production from the North and Midwest Regions to the South and Southeast. The main novelty of this directive is that of setting a time frame so that the stretches concerned are either returned or recovered.
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In addition, the ANTT expects to bring out, within the next few weeks, directives changing some rules of this segment. One of these rules will make it mandatory for the concessionaires to have targets of usage for each stretch under their control, which could help to boost investments in the whole network managed by private enterprise – the current rules just set a global target for the whole area of concession.
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