Iran, Azerbaijan plan to launch 2 direct train trips per week (exclusive)

Baku, Azerbaijan, March 3

By Farhad Daneshvar - Trend:

A train will run twice a week between Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan city and Iran's Mashhad city, an Iranian envoy has told Trend.

Iran's Consul General in Nakhchivan Mansour Airom has said that Javid Gurbanov, head of Azerbaijan Railways CJSC and Abbas Haj-Fathalian, a member of the board of the Islamic Republic of Iran Railways, discussed the plan for launching direct trips through the Nakhchivan-Julfa-Tabriz-Tehran-Mashhad railway during a meeting in Nakhchivan March 3.

The envoy also said that Iranian Minister of Transportation Abbas Akhoundi and Azerbaijani Minister of Economy Shahin Mustafayev signed a document named "Framework Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran on the coordination of railways of Azerbaijan and Iran" during a meeting in Tehran on Feb. 23.

Saying that a couple of the articles in the framework agreement considered railway cooperation between the two countries, he added that today's meeting was aimed at laying a ground for inaugurating the plan.

He further said that the train trips will be launched after carrying out technical studies regarding the procedure of ticket sale and also the customs services by both sides.

Airom added that the plan is expected to be finalized after a meeting between the heads of the railway administrations of Iran and Azerbaijan in March.