"Nearly 900 thousand tons of cargo from the BTK line has been transported in the three years since its opening. As TCDD Tasimacilik, we will continue to increase the support of locomotives and wagons on this line," Hasan Pezük, General Manager of TCDD Transportation, said at the Working Group Meeting of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR).
In his speech, Pezük stated that the restriction of cross-country crossings to prevent the Covid-19 epidemic interrupted the supply chain all over the world. In this period, there was a significant load flow from road transport to rail due to the measures and restrictions taken, especially in road crossings, and an increase in international rail freight transport was observed as follows:
"In order to meet these increasing demands and not to disrupt the supply chain, necessary measures have been taken by our General Directorate in international rail freight transportation. In this context, wagon crossings at all our railway border gates have started to be carried out without human contact, and a capacity increase has been achieved in the required railway border crossings. Today, we transport cargo to many countries in Europe, Iran, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and the People's Republic of China on the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway line by block trains from our country."
He noted that the Middle Corridor offers important opportunities for freight traffic in Asia to reach the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean region, thanks to our country's port connections: "Besides, our export shipments carried out by combined transport with port connection, where the railway and maritime transport are used together, continue intensively to different countries."
Pezük pointed out that there are a significant logistics and transportation potential in the Middle Corridor, which covers more than 60 countries, 4.5 billion people in the world population, and 30 percent of the world economy. Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey followed, soon in transit to Ukraine and other European countries with the fastest, pointed to the forefront as the most suitable route in terms of climate.
Reminding that uninterrupted rail transport is provided to Europe via the Marmaray Bosphorus Tube Crossing and the Middle Corridor and BTK railway line and that this is very important in world logistics, Pezük said that nearly 900 thousand tons of cargo had been transported from the BTK line in the three years since its opening. TCDD Taşımacılık Ş. stated that they would continue increasing the support of locomotives and wagons on this line.
A meeting of the TITR working group (ZOOM) is being held in Istanbul with the participation of members of Pacific Eurasia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Ukraine, as well as officials of railway companies from Poland and Romania.