Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway
Railway line in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Baku–Tbilisi–Kars (BTK), or Baku–Tbilisi–Akhalkalaki–Kars railway (BTAK), is a railway connecting Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, which became operational on 30 October 2017 following several years of delays.[2] The project was originally due to be completed by 2010,[3] but was delayed to 2013,[4] 2015,[5] 2016,[6] and, following a fifth trilateral meeting in February 2016, foreign ministers of the three countries announced that the railway would finally be completed in 2017.[7]
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Status | Active | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Locale | Azerbaijan Georgia Turkey | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
History | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Opened | 30 October 2017; 6 years ago (2017-10-30)[1] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Technical | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Line length | 826 kilometres (513 mi) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Following the first test run by a passenger train from Tbilisi to Akhalkalaki on 27 September 2017, the BTK was inaugurated for cargo service on 30 October 2017, in a ceremony in Alyat hosted by the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev.[8][9]
The Baku–Tbilisi–Kars project was intended to provide a rail corridor linking Azerbaijan to Turkey via Georgia whilst avoiding Armenia, following the closure of the Kars–Gyumri–Tbilisi railway in 1993, as a result of the first Nagorno-Karabakh War. The project also provided an additional rail route between China and Europe (via Central Asia) which avoided Russian territory. In late 2015, a goods train took only 15 days to travel from South Korea to Istanbul via China, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia—considerably less time than a journey by sea. The line's initial annual freight capacity of 6.5 million tonnes is planned to increase to 17 million tonnes.[10]