November 29, 2024: It’s recently become visible, via satellite photos, that the Russian railroads are at a standstill in many parts of the country and thousands of locomotives and rail cars are going out of service because of a shortage of ball bearings. The ball bearing shortage is a problem that’s been building for over a decade and has now arrived. Satellite photos show major Russian cities receiving little or no merchandise by rail. The annual four months of cold and often freezing weather has begun. While oil and natural gas pipelines are still working, performing maintenance on those pipelines requires access to a functioning railroad system. Currently, if there are any pipeline problems, they have to be repaired using truck transportation. This takes longer if the problem is in an area with no roads or river/canal nearby. Some of these areas will take trucks a week to reach. Unlike the extensive road networks in Europe and North America, Russia depends mostly on railroads.

Russia never built a large network of highways. It was too expensive. Instead long-distance commercial and military land transportation was handled by the government owned and operated railroad. There are 128,000 kilometers of track on which 800,000 uniformed railroad workers used to operate over 19,000 locomotives and over 800,000 railway cars. In addition there are 65,000 kilometers of private railways built, maintained and used by various industries.

Russia has lost a growing number of railroad employees to army recruiters. Despite the importance of the railroads, the Russian military will grab any military age railway workers it can and turn them into soldiers for the Ukraine conflict. The government also uses fake ads seeking workers for the railroads. Those who respond are then easier to grab and put into the army. Several million Russians have left the country to avoid military service. Many of these men have completed their one year of conscript service and don’t want to be forcibly mobilized into the military to die in Ukraine. The end result is a railroad labor shortage.

Now the railroads are failing and so is the economy. Russia has been operating under economic sanctions for a decade and the sanctions got a lot worse after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. The invasion force is stalled in part because of a shortage of soldiers, but also because the railroad crisis means their troops are not getting needed supplies of food, munitions, medical supplies and cold weather clothing for the next three months of low temperatures and lots of snow.

The increased sanctions and reduced railroad capabilities have caused political problems for the Russian government and sustainability problems for Russian forces in Ukraine. To make matters worse, in late November, the Kerch Strait bridge suffered a partial collapse, apparently brought on by years of Ukrainian attacks followed by hasty Russian repairs.

As a result of all this, since mid-2024 Russian forces in Ukraine have been suffering ammunition shortages and increasingly unreliable railroad deliveries. Part of the reason for this was the August 2nd Ukrainian attack into Kursk province. The Ukrainians destroyed several key bridges during their incursion and Russia has not been able to assemble the materials and manpower to make repairs. The Russian railroad system is also in bad shape. Over two years of economic sanctions sidelined hundreds of locomotives and reduced track and signal system maintenance. One thing that increased was Ukrainian sabotage efforts against Russian railroads. The sabotage is often carried out by Russians fed up with Putin’s foolish and costly war. Russia has been arresting, prosecuting and jailing some of these saboteurs. This does not appear to diminish the number of sabotage incidents.

Ukrainian sabotage teams in Russian territory disrupt railroad movement by damaging key elements of the railroad signals and communications systems. This makes the railroads less reliable and often leads to accidents that derail supply trains and block further use of that line until the wreckage is removed and the rails are repaired. Ukraine has even been able to get operatives deep inside Russia to damage the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which is currently used to move weapons and munitions and North Korean soldiers from North Korea to Ukraine.

Ukraine continues to concentrate on Russian logistics, using long range missiles and GPS guided aircraft bombs to destroy Russian supplies that have been stockpiled for troops to use. Russia responded by moving the stockpiled supplies farther from the front lines and, when possible, storing them in underground bunkers. Such bunkers are great in theory, but in practice there are not many of these bunkers and supply stockpiles often end up out in the open, on pallets and covered by tarps.

Meanwhile, the railroad situation in Ukraine is not ideal. Ukraine and the NATO countries have different gauge railroads. Europe uses what is known as Standard Gauge while Ukraine uses the old Soviet standard. Gauge means the distance between the two rails. Current standard gauge rails are 1,455mm apart. The Russian gauge is wider with the rails 1,524mm apart. Until 1991 Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, which means Ukrainian railroads are Russian gauge. To deal with this problem, Ukraine built a transshipment point in the west Ukraine town of Uzhhorod which is on the border with Slovakia and near the Hungarian border. Here there are cranes that will quickly lift standard cargo containers from Russian gauge flatcars and load the containers onto European Standard Gauge flatcars. Passenger trains have a similar arrangement where passengers can disembark and walk a short distance to trains with a different gauge. Rail gauge can be quickly changed, especially if the conversion is from a wider to a narrower gauge. Converting locomotives and rail cars to use a narrower gauge takes longer and requires special facilities. Ukraine is also supposed to receive locomotives and rail cars from NATO countries where there are proper gauge rail lines and locomotive and rail car maintenance facilities.

Ukraine has already converted some existing rail lines to European Gauge rail lines in several cities. Eventually Ukraine wants to convert all its major rail lines to Standard gauge. This will make it easier to handle trade with Europe. If there’s another war with Russia, the Russians will not have all those Russian gauge rail lines available to quickly move troops and supplies into Ukraine on Russian gauge railroads. Instead, the Russians will have to use roads or capture Ukrainian railroad engines along with passenger, cargo, and flatcars so they can use Ukrainian European Standard gauge railroads.