BAKU, Azerbaijan, November 2. If Iran's Sanandaj-Bashmaq railway project is implemented, the country’s another railway line can become an international transit route, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said, Trend reports.
He made the remark at the opening ceremony of the Hamadan-Sanandaj railway line in Sanandaj city of Iran’s Kurdistan Province on November 2, 2023.
The president noted that today, Hamadan-Sanandaj railway line has been put into use, but since this railway line has not been built up to Bashmaq customs, it is still not considered an advanced railway line.
The length of the distance from the city of Sanandaj in the Kurdistan region to the Bashmaq customs is more than 130 kilometers.
“In the past years, there is unfinished work in the country in many projects, including road, railway, seaports, and airports and other fields. If this work is completed, great leap in the country's economy can be expected,” Raisi said.
Raisi also stated that the creation of infrastructures in various fields in the Kurdistan Province of Iran is one of the issues that the government focuses on. In this direction, serious work is being done to supply the entire province with water, electricity and gas.
On November 2, the Hamadan-Sanandaj railway line was officially launched. The railway line has a total length of 151 kilometers (some 48 km in Hamadan Province, 103 km in Kurdistan Province).
The railway project originally cost 34 trillion rials (about $810 million) to launch, however later the cost ballooned to 150 trillion rials (about $3.57 billion) due to Iranian rial devaluation. Iran has experienced serious devaluations in recent years. As a result of devaluations, the value of the Iranian rial has seriously decreased. At the beginning of 2018, $1 was worth 20,000 rials on the black market, but now $1 is around 515,000 rials.
---
Follow the author on X (Twitter):@BaghishovElnur