Azerbaijan Railways reveals when BTK starts transporting passengers (UPDATE)

Details added (first version posted on 13:30)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct. 13

By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:

From 2018, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway will start transporting passengers, Javid Gurbanov, head of the Azerbaijan Railways CJSC, told reporters in Baku Oct. 13.

“As you know, we have purchased 30 railway cars that were produced by Swiss company Stadler using a special technology,” he said.

Gurbanov added that travel time from Azerbaijan’s Baku to Turkey’s Kars will be about 16-18 hours.

“The Georgian part of the railway stretches through the highlands, where the speed of the train will not exceed 60-70 kilometers per hour, so the travel time will be 16-18 hours,” he explained.

He added that tariffs for passenger transportation via BTK have not been discussed yet.

The BTK railway has been constructed on the basis a Georgian-Azerbaijani-Turkish intergovernmental agreement. The railway’s peak capacity will be 17 million tons of cargo per year. At an initial stage, this figure will be one million passengers and 6.5 million tons of cargo.