Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct. 18 /Trend A. D.Khatinoglu/
The first train has been launched symbolically in the Bandar Abbas - Almaty route, Farsnews reported quoting Managing Director of Iran's railway Abdolali Saheb Mohammadi as saying.
"The Bandar Abbas - Almaty corridor is 3,756 kilometer in length and has capacity to transport 2 million tons of goods," he said.
The Uzen-Kyzylkaya-Bereket-Etrek-Gorgan railway line, connecting Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran, is part of North-South railway which has been launched today.
The Etrek-Gorgan section of the railway will be complete in March. Therefore, Iran joined the North-South railway via its existing Mashhad-Sarakhs railway section, which operates since 1995.
Thus, the train will run to Turkmenistan via the Mashhad-Sarakhs route and onwards to Kazakhstan.
The North-South Transnational Corridor is a 677km-long railway line connecting the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstanç Ozbekistan and Turkmenistan with Iran and the Persian Gulf. It links Uzen in Kazakhstan with Gyzylgaya-Bereket-Etrek in Turkmenistan and end at Gorgan in Iran's Golestan province. In Iran, the railway will be linked to national network making its way to the ports of the Persian Gulf.
Earlier, Kazakh Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov told media that Iran intends to complete constructing its section within the Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran railway project by next March.
The project is implemented in accordance with the Joint Declaration, signed in October 2007 by the presidents of three countries involved in the project and a trilateral intergovernmental agreement.