The chaos and congestion which ravage the port of St. Petersburg have been kind to Winfried Scheidges.


Scheidges, chairman of Mos Trans-Europe, a Russian-Dutch trucking joint venture, has seen his business grow exponentially as shippers choose trucks over ships to get their goods safely into the Russian interior.


"It's no so much saving time as it is saving the shipment", Scheidges said, noting that his company's service Rotterdam to Moscow, has grown from one to 25 trucks per week in 14 months.


St. Petersburg's infrastructure is now buckling under the weight of cargo diverted from the Ukrainian port of Odessa after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which raised both inter-republican tensions and port fees in Ukraine for Russian shipments.


St. Petersburg's container yard is usually packed, with many shipments spread out haphazardly in other areas. The Port's antiquated computer system can only track 12, 000 containers, although the number of containers in the port often exceeds that, according-to Viktor Antonov, head of the container department at Baltic Shipping Co.


And while shippers say theft, cargo loss and general delays there have been reduced by Sea-Land Service Inc'. s new weekly service, the only major Western carrier offering frequent scheduled callings, there is only so much the carrier can do. What's more, shippers burnt once often don't want to go back again.


"I'll never use that St. Petersburg mess again", said one U. S. food importer in Moscow who still uses Sea-Land from the United States to Helsinki, Finland, and then trucks to Moscow, albeit at a significantly higher cost.


Truck routes, on average, can cost two times higher with a rate of roughly $7, 000 per twenty-foot container quoted for a U. S. East Coast port-Rotterdam-Moscow route as opposed to $3, 500 for a U. S. - St. Petersburg-Moscow link via ship. Trucking can also save several days time. For example, MosTransEurope's route to Moscow takes on average 21 days from the U. S. , while optimal service through St. Petersburg takes 25 days.


MosTransEurope this summer improved its time and loss rates through two new weekly truck ferries from Kiel, Germany, to the ports of Klaipeda, Lithuania, and Riga, Latvia.


Now some 60 percent of the company's shipments have been re-routed, with the remainder tracked through Germany, Poland and Belarus enroute to Russia.


The new ferry service has helped reduce loss, largely because it reduces the number of borders crossed from four to three.