Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct 3 /Trend A. Tagiyeva/
The railway project on the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars route will be connected with the Marmaray rail project which will enable direct transportation from Azerbajan to Europe, the Turkish ministry of transport, seafaring and communications reported to Trend on Tuesday.
The ministry said the Marmaray project is the final link of the Silk Way project which envisages continuous transportation between Peking and London.
According to the ministry, the construction of the Marmaray railway tunnel which is designed to connect European and Anatolian parts of Istanbul will be completed in September of 2013.
Previously, the project was expected to be completed by the end of 2013.
The volume of railway transportation in Istanbul will increase from 20 to 28 per cent from the total volume of transportations following the commission of the tunnel.
The length of the rail road will be 76.3 kilometres with 13.6 kilometres of tunnel.
The railway's transportation capacity will amount to 75,000 passengers per hour in one direction and trains will start every two minutes. The transportation capacity in both directions will stand at 1.2 million passengers a day.
Due to the project, the time to cover the distance between the stations of Uskudar and Sirekchi will take four minutes, between Soultucheshme and Yenikapi - 12 minutes, Bostanji and Bakirkey- 37 minutes and Gebze and Halkali - 105 minutes.
The ministry also noted that this is the only project with transportation of both passengers and freight through the same tunnel.