Iran To Finish Building Section Of North-South Transport Corridor By Late June - Company

Iran will finish the construction of a section of the international North-South transport corridor (INSTC), the Rasht-Bandar Anzali, or Rasht-Caspian railroad, by June 21, Abbas Khatibi, the deputy head of the Construction and Development of Transportation Infrastructures Company, said on Thursday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 23rd March, 2023) Iran will finish the construction of a section of the international North-South transport corridor (INSTC), the Rasht-Bandar Anzali, or Rasht-Caspian railroad, by June 21, Abbas Khatibi, the deputy head of the Construction and Development of Transportation Infrastructures Company, said on Thursday.

The Rasht-Caspian section is an initial stage of the construction of the railroad Rasht-Astara. In the future, it is planned to build the next section of the route from the port of Caspian to Astara in northwestern Iran.

"We will commission the Rasht-Caspian railroad with a length of 37 kilometers (22 miles) by the end of this spring (by June 21, according to the Iranian calendar) ... It will allow to deliver ... cargo by rail from the Caspian Sea to the south of the country to the Persian Gulf and Oman," Khatibi was quoted as saying by the IRNA news agency.

He specified that the lower part of the railway track was 85% finished, and 16 out of 37 kilometers of the track had already been built.

In January, company head Kheirollah Khademi said Iran was planning to finish the railroad by the end of March.

The INSTC is a 7,200-kilometer-long multi-mode network connecting Russia's Saint Petersburg to India's Mumbai. This is an alternative to the maritime route connecting Europe, countries of the Persian Gulf and India Ocean through the Suez Canal. The Rasht-Astara railroad, Iranian part of the INSTC, remained unfinished. Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan are preparing an intergovernmental agreement on the construction of this section and plan to finish it later in 2023.