Operail transports goods on Estonian railways. We have long-term experience with transportation of various groups of goods. We transport chemicals, fertilizers, petroleum products, oil shale, timber products, cereal grain, heavy and oversized equipment, bulk, palm oil, raw sugar, etc.
We service Estonian import, export, and domestic trade, as well as transit trade between Asia and Europe and Northern and Southern Europe. From 1 January 2023, Operail does not transport goods from Russia and Belarus, but we continue to transport goods from other countries through Russia or Belarus.
Our customers are Estonian companies – mainly logistics and production companies and owners of volumetric goods. In cooperation with our partners, we offer our customers individual solutions, which include everything from freight route planning to delivery of the goods to the customer’s door.
Rail transport is a specific field of activity with high safety requirements, which means that many different regulations must be taken into account: international and domestic agreements, transport regulations, instructions for calculating freight payments, etc. Documentation related to freight transport is available HERE.
In the case of large volumes of transport (a thousand or more tons per month), we recommend asking for an offer to conclude a cooperation agreement, in which we can also agree on discounts for transport and additional services. In case of a smaller capacity, the goods can be transported based on the price list or through the forwarding agent.
For container service-related queries, please contact our sales manager:
Maire Talihärm
Since 2018, we offer our customers in Estonia a door-to-door freight solution – a domestic multimodal container train service. In addition to rail transport, we also organise the road transport of the goods to and from the railway, as well as the transshipment of cargo containers from wagons to cars and from cars to wagons.
The service allows companies that do not have a railway branch to use rail transport without having to worry about coordinating different modes of transport.
The goal of our multimodal project is for goods to be transported in Estonia as much as possible by rail and as little as possible by road. Rail transport is more environmentally friendly and safer because one container train with one driver transports 54 truckloads of goods. This makes the road cleaner and safer for other road users as well.
Multimodal transport volumes have increased every year since the beginning of the project. In 2022, we fulfilled the goal we set for ourselves and removed 20,000 truckloads of cargo containers from the roads!
We currently offer the multimodal container train service on the lines Muuga–Tartu–Muuga, Muuga–Sillamäe–Muuga, and Tartu–Sillamäe–Tartu.
For multimodal freight related services, please contact the Head of Multimodal Freight Transportation:
Sanda Benbik-Voitovitš
Dangerous goods are transported by rail only in accordance with the requirements of the Chemicals Act and under the supervision of a safety adviser. We also comply with the RID (Regulations Concerning the International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Rail) annex to the COTIF convention on international rail transport and the SMGS agreement on international rail freight transport (Annex 2). These documents are available HERE.
For the transport of oversized goods, we will develop a loading scheme suitable for the goods. We have long-term experience with all types of heavy equipment transport: tractors, bulldozers, cranes, trucks, tracked vehicles, factory equipment, building and manufacturing structures, etc.
We offer:
For queries about transport of goods under special conditions, please contact our Sales Manager:
Kirill Spektor
We offer rail transport in Estonia for goods which start and/or finish their railway journey in a station located in Estonia. The suitable station can be selected from the list of Estonian stations open for commercial operations.
The technical management procedures of Estonian Railways regulate the work of the stations in general. Separate agreements are made to serve each branch.
Base and intermediate stations open for commercial operations:
In the years 2020–2022, we also transported goods in Finland. At the beginning of 2023, Operail sold its Finnish freight transport subsidiary, Operail Finland, to Nurminen Logistics, a logistics company listed on the Finnish stock exchange. For questions related to Operail Finland and Finnish transport, please contact the representatives of Nurminen Logistics.
For more information, please contact the managing director of Operail Finland Oy:
Ilkka Seppänen
From 2012 to 2021, Operail rented rolling stock. In May 2021, the owner of Operail decided to stop renting rolling stock as a non-strategic business line. In 2022, the owner decided to exit the business through the sale of assets, and a tender for the sale of rental wagons was announced. Therefore, starting from 2023, Operail no longer rents wagons.
We check, maintain and repair all common wagons and locomotives. We are skilled in our work, know the requirements related to the repair of railway vehicles, and offer high-quality services.
We carry out repairs of wagons and locomotives mainly at the Tapa depot which, with its more than 135-year history, is one of the oldest companies engaged in the repair and maintenance of rolling stock on the entire 1,520 mm gauge railway.
We can maintain and repair all the most common types of freight wagons. We mostly repair C30-M, PH, C36, TEM-TMH, and CME3 type locomotives but, if necessary, we are able to service our customers with other types of locomotives as well. We have a suitably qualified team to provide locomotive maintenance at the location of the customer – both in Estonia and abroad.
In May 2016, we opened a new paint and wash workshop at the Tapa depot, where in addition to rolling stock, all kinds of other metal parts, objects, equipment and vehicles can be painted.
The Tapa depot of Operail complies with the ISO 9001:2015 quality management system standard. In addition to ISO 90001:2015, we are certified as a Europa ECM unit. We also have certifications No. 794 and 998, ISO 3834-2:2021, EN 15085-2, and ISO/IEC 17025:2017.
We offer the following repair services:
Mihhail Sinani