United Multimodal › About
When a crossing closes, a railwayman re-plans your train. Not an account manager.
Everyone in this trade has staff. Ours spent their careers inside the railway — traffic control, dispatching, locomotive operations. Together, more than 150 years of it. That is the whole reason this company works.
- Five careers— one marker each, on the same line
- Guaranteed by the owner— not a rounded-up marketing figure
Why we exist
The plan is easy. The re-plan is the job.
Any operator can book a path and send a train. That part is ordinary, and every competent company does it. What separates them is the morning something stops — a crossing shuts, a terminal backs up, a wagon is bad-ordered — and someone has to decide what happens next, in the next few minutes, with real money on it.
That decision is not a customer-service task. It is railway dispatching, and it is a trade people spend a working life learning. We built this company around people who already had. It is why we are a licensed railway undertaking rather than a broker with a phone, and why the answer you get is a decision rather than a promise to check.
We are not going to tell you nothing ever goes wrong on this corridor. It does, regularly, and anyone who says otherwise has not run it. What we will tell you is who picks up the phone when it does, and what they are able to do about it.
Founder and Chief Executive
Vitalii Melnyk
Vitalii Melnyk
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Vitalii founded United Multimodal Services and runs it. He owns the commercial relationship with every customer of any size, the rail assets, and the corridor itself — the path allocations, the terminal relationships and the supplier agreements that decide whether a lane can actually be served.
In practice that means the person quoting your lane is the person who can commit to it. There is no pricing committee behind him and no regional office to refer to. If the answer is no, you get it on the first call.
He is also the reason the company is built the way it is: hybrid on purpose, owning what is worth owning and leasing the rest, so the train that moves your cargo is chosen on what fits rather than on what we happen to have parked.
The founders
Four shareholders, all of them in the business.
Not investors with a board seat. Each of them runs a part of the company day to day, and between them they cover the three countries and the two gauges this corridor actually crosses.
Ekaterine Bitsadze
Founder
Administration. Keeps the company’s corporate structure and records straight across three jurisdictions.
Aleksandr Tkachenko
Founder
Rail operations. Spent his career inside the railway before this company existed.
Katarzyna Leskiewicz
Founder
The Polish side — PKP PLK, terminals and the paperwork a border actually wants.
Viktoria Rybalchencko
Founder
Legal. Contracts, carriage terms and the liability questions a shipper asks before signing.
Running it day to day
The executive line.
Below the founders, two people carry the commercial work. Their photographs are being taken and will appear here shortly.
Maciej
Director, Materials
Runs the materials unit and its P&L — pricing, stock and key customers.
Anhelina
Marketing Executive
Outreach, content and the day-to-day running of the commercial machine.
Materials
Buying stone or aggregate? Maciej and Anhelina answer this one.
Stone, grit and aggregate from our own warehouse in Poland, from one big bag upwards, to business buyers on a VAT invoice. Whichever channel you pick below reaches this desk, not the rail desk. Full range on the materials page.
How can we help?
Pick a way to reach us. We answer during working hours.
You are talking to the UMS assistant. Please check its answers — a salesperson confirms the price.
The group
One licence, four business units.
The rail operation sits at the centre. Around it are the units that exist because the rail operation needed them — containers we could not rent to the standard we wanted, empty legs nobody had a market for, and a materials trade that fills wagons which would otherwise run back light.
UMC and GCS are both held with partners. We keep the shareholdings between the shareholders, and we would rather say that plainly than publish a diagram that implies more than it should.
Proof, not adjectives
What you can check before you call.
Everything below is either a public record or an asset with a number on it.
What we run and how we route it is set out on the freight page. The containers, and why two of them beat a grain hopper, are on container leasing. The materials unit sells stone and aggregate from stock in Poland — that is the materials page.
Questions people ask before the first call
Who owns United Multimodal Services?
Five founders, all of them working in the business. Vitalii Melnyk is Founder and Chief Executive. The company is a Polish limited company, Sp. z o.o., registered in Warszawa with the operating office in Szczecin.
What does “150 years” actually mean?
It is the working careers of our people added together — traffic control, dispatching and locomotive operations on Polish and Ukrainian railways. It is not the age of the company. We say it because it is the reason the company can do what it does.
Are you a carrier or a forwarder?
A licensed railway undertaking. The licence is on the UTK register in Poland and you can check it yourself in about a minute. We also lease wagons and buy traction where that suits the lane better, so in practice we are both — but the licence is the part a forwarder cannot rent.
What are UMC, GCS and RailX?
Business units alongside the rail operation. UMC in Poland and GCS in Ukraine hold our specialised bulk containers, both with partners. RailX is a marketplace for empty block-train legs. There is also a materials unit selling stone and aggregate from stock in Poland.
Who will I actually deal with?
On commercial terms, Vitalii. On day-to-day movement, a dispatcher. We are deliberately small enough that you will not be handed between departments, and you will have a mobile number rather than a ticket queue.
What languages do you work in?
Polish, Ukrainian and English, all three at working level. Documentation and customs paperwork are handled in the language the border needs, not the one that suits us.
One lane
Send us one lane. You get a price in one working day.
Where it loads, where it goes, how many tonnes. You get back which crossing we would route it through, the lead time on each, and what happens to your cargo when one of them closes.
If rail is the wrong answer for your volume, we will say that instead of quoting you anyway.