Baku, Azerbaijan, Dec. 11
By Umid Niayesh - Trend:
The rail transportation network of Iran transported over 25 million passengers during the last fiscal year (ended on March 21), Mohammad Reza Nosrat Nezami, deputy head of Iran Railways said.
Nezami said that about 22 billion kilometer- tons of goods also were transported through railways in the country during the period, the Islamic Republic's Mehr news agency reported Dec. 11.
Kilometer-ton (kmt) unit is the transportation of one ton of goods over one kilometer.
Iran currently has over 8000 kilometers of standard railways.
The Islamic republic plans to increase passenger transfer capacity of the railway network to
40 million people in the next two years.
Over 20 million metric tons of goods were transited via Iran's rail network in the first seven months of the current year (March 21-Oct. 22). The figure shows a 5.2 percent rise compared to the same period in the previous year.
Iran's railway networks recently linked to Central Asia railways during a ceremony that took place on the Turkmen-Iranian border with the participation of Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov of Turkmenistan and Hassan Rouhani of Iran.
The Iran-Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan railway makes shorter the distance between the Gulf, Central Asia and Europe.
The railway is part of the North-South international transport corridor. A project, called the North-South, is being implemented on the basis of an agreement signed in 2007 by Turkmenistan, Iran and Kazakhstan. The railway length is 925 kilometers in total, with 85 kilometers on Iran's territory, 700 on Turkmenistan's territory and the remaining 140 on Kazakhstan's territory.
Edited by CN
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Umid Niayesh is Trend Agency's staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @UmidNiayesh