What is counted
Loading is the weight of freight put on wagons across the RZD network in a month, measured in tonnes. RZD reports a monthly total and a breakdown by cargo: coal, oil and oil products, ores, grain, timber, construction materials, scrap metal and others.
Most of that tonnage is bulk. In its 2021 annual report, RZD put low-revenue cargo, the first of its three tariff classes, at 770.5 million tonnes, or 60.1% of all loading. What moves the total, then, is mostly what happens to a handful of heavy commodities and the routes that carry them.
How the monitor builds the level
The monitor keeps a rolling twelve-month total of loading and divides it by the 2021 total. It uses the latest annual figure together with year-to-date tonnage and its change on a year earlier, which gives a twelve-month total every month without waiting for December. Tonnes need no adjustment for inflation.
The pre-war anchor, worth 100, is the 2021 level. The trouble line, worth 0, is 80% of it, a fall of a fifth; that line is a registered judgment, fixed in advance. The monitor used to read loading as a change on the year before, with its trouble line at a fall of 8% on the year. On 21 August 2026 the score moved to the level against 2021, and on 22 August the trouble line followed; both changes are dated in the amendment record.
Where the figures come from
The 2021 base is RZD's own figure: its annual report gives 1,282.8 million tonnes, 3.2% more than in 2020. The monitor's registered base is 1,282.7 million tonnes, a number it derived from the rounded figures in RZD's announcement for 2022: 1,234 million tonnes, 3.8% below 2021. The difference, 0.1 million tonnes, does not move the score.
The later figures come from RZD's press service, but the monitor does not read them from RZD's own site. Annual totals for 2022–2025 were taken from trade-press reports of RZD's announcements, and the monthly figures come from Rolling Stock World, a trade publication that reproduces RZD's monthly loading releases. The monitor stores a copy of every page it reads. These reproduce RZD's numbers but are not RZD documents, and the source listed under the live reading says so.
An independent official series offers a check. Rosstat's monthly report on the socio-economic situation gives the tonnage of freight carried by rail and the freight turnover in tonne-kilometres, which also counts distance. It is not the same measure as RZD's loading, and the monitor does not score it, but over January to July 2026 it showed 0.9% less freight carried by rail than a year earlier, close to the 0.8% fall in RZD's loading.
Why a physical measure
Most of the monitor's inputs are sums of money or ratios that the state publishes and can shape. Tonnes of freight are harder to manage: the quantity is physical, and a total far out of line with what shippers, ports and buyers see would not stay credible for long. That is why loading is a class-2 indicator, and why the monitor calls it physical confirmation. A class-2 reading can trigger a verdict only together with a second class-2 indicator, such as regional budgets, past its own line.
Loading is now the monitor's only physical measure. Power generation was retired on 21 August 2026, because it duplicated rail loading and had no monthly archive the monitor could fetch; the methodology page says plainly that physical activity now rests on a single indicator.
What the series has shown
On RZD's figures as reported, loading fell to 1,234.3 million tonnes in 2022, 3.8% below 2021, and to 1,116 million tonnes in 2025, a fall of 5.6% from 2024. The live reading below shows where the twelve-month total stands now.
Individual cargoes can pull against the trend. Over January to July 2026 loading was 0.8% lower than a year earlier; grain, up by more than half, added more tonnage than any other cargo, and without its growth the fall would have been 1.8%, as our report on the data found. Coal was the largest single cargo in that period. One strong cargo can mask weakness in the rest, and it can turn quickly: drone strikes in August stopped all three grain terminals at Novorossiysk.
What rail loading cannot tell you
Loading measures weight, not value. A tonne of coal and a tonne of machinery count the same, so a shift towards lighter, more valuable goods can show up as a fall. It covers the RZD network only, not pipelines, road haulage or shipping. And because bulk commodities such as coal and grain dominate it, it reflects export routes, port capacity and sanctions as well as domestic demand.
It is therefore not a measure of GDP or industrial production. It is one physical check alongside money indicators such as overdue receivables, which show strain between companies in roubles rather than tonnes, and oil and gas revenue, which tracks what the budget earns from the largest exports.
The live reading
The reading below shows loading over the twelve months to the latest published month, as a share of the 2021 level, with its score: the 2021 level is 100 and 80% of it is 0. It changes when the next month's loading figures are published.