The purpose of the article is to develop a methodology for minimizing monthly expenses to justify the implementation of rational organizational and economic decisions to improve the quality of transport services for cargo owners and the operation of freight rail transport. The research methodology reveals the economic nature of the transport process, taking into account the costs of railways to perform initial operations at loading stations, moving cargo sections, performing the whole complex of operations at technical stations and unloading stations, as well as the costs of moving empty cars. This approach is due to the fact that the quality of transport services for cargo owners depends both on the duration of delivery of goods to destinations and on the cost of transporting them, which determines the price of any goods at the point of consumption, therefore the task of reducing the transport component of the cost of goods is complex and important for railway transport and cargo owners. Findings . As the generalizations show, in market conditions, the task of increasing the efficiency of cargo delivery should be solved not only by technical and technological improvement of the main railway transport, but also by industrial railway transport, where the average simple wagons usually exceed fourteen days. Industrial enterprises almost do not develop their own transport infrastructure, and often use railroad freight cars as warehouses on wheels through an economically unreasonable small fee for using railcars, which is many times smaller than the income of railways from each railcar used by the cargo owner in transportation. Therefore, the time is ripe at the state level to urgently introduce a compromise system for managing cargo resources, taking into account the interests of both customers and railways, and the implementation of detailed technical and economic calculations for various possible options for technical and technological development of industrial and mainline transport. The originality and practical value of the presented research consists in a clear construction of the functionality of monthly operating costs for the delivery of goods, providing for the phased determination of the costs of performing all technological operations during the entire period of transportation.