Structural Reform in the Russian Railway Sector: from Single Alternatives to Regional Ones

The paper discusses strategic defects of a concept of the railway transportation reform. We prove that a regional decomposition of the Russian railway network will be a factor of a strategic importance in time. To prove this thesis, we use a cluster analysis of Russian railway traffic flows. We present our arguments for the Trans-Siberian Railway to be classified as a natural monopolist. Theoretical variants of the Russian Railway Company decomposition show that we would benefit at the national level due to competitiveness between natural monopolists on a domestic railway market. A system-oriented analysis of such benefits and those obtained by a united and hierarchically governed railway system would allow making reasonable institutional decisions on how the railway reform could get away from the current institutional trap out