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Turkey completes over 80% of work on BTK railway

Business Materials 4 December 2014 18:07 (UTC +04:00)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec.4

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Over 83 percent of the work has been completed in Turkey as part of the construction of Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway, Turkish Anadolu agency reported on Dec.4.

Currently, the work on construction of 550 meters-long tunnel as part of the construction of BTK is underway in Turkey.

It is planned to create a logistics center in Turkey's Kars province in early 2016 to optimize the freight flow.

Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway is being constructed on the basis of the Georgian-Azerbaijani-Turkish intergovernmental agreement.

The State Oil Fund of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) finances the project in accordance with the Azerbaijani president's decree 'On the implementation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars project activities' dated February 21, 2007.

A new 105-kilometer branch of the railroad is being constructed as part of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars project. In addition, the railway's Akhalkalaki-Marabda-Tbilisi section is under reconstruction in Georgia that will increase its capacity to 15 million metric tons of cargo per year. A post is under construction in Akhalkalaki for the transition of trains from the existing tracks in Georgia to the European ones.

A test train is expected to run on the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway by late 2014 and it is planned to complete the implementation of the project in 2015.

The peak capacity of the corridor will be 17 million metric tons of cargo per year. At the initial stage, this figure will be equal to one million passengers and 6.5 million metric tons of cargo.

Edited by SI
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Rufiz Hafizoglu is the head of Trend Agency's Arabic news service, follow him on Twitter: @rhafizoglu

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