A THORNY PATH FOR THE STEEL WAY

The construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) trunk railway will be accelerated - this is the outcome of a meeting of the transport ministers of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia which took place in early August.  A little earlier, during the 6th Meeting of the Azerbaijani-Georgian Intergovernmental Commission, which was held in Baku, a memorandum was signed on increasing the competitiveness of the transport corridor and the creation of a working group to attract additional cargo.  A new initiative is also in the offing:  Baku and Ankara are studying a project to link the railways of the Naxcivan Autonomous Republic with Kars.

How it all started

A little under three years ago, the presidents of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia launched an important regional transportation project - the construction of the BTK railway.  The project envisaged the construction of a 98-km stretch of railway from Kars to Akhalkalaki, of which 68 km was to be built on Turkish territory and some 30 km in Georgia.  Reconstruction of the existing 160-km track from the town of Akhalkalaki to Tbilisi was also planned.

Turkey took a decision to fund the construction using its own funds, and Georgia received a favourable-terms loan from the Azerbaijani government to build a section of track from the Marabda station to the Turkish border and to upgrade the associated railway infrastructure.  The $200-million loan was issued by the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) for a 20-year term at an annual interest rate of 1%.  The construction work started in mid-2009 and continued with varying degrees of success on several sections in Georgia and Turkey.  However, for a number of reasons, the participants in the project had to twice postpone the date for bringing the trunk railway in operation.  Initially, it was planned that the BTK would be completed in 2009 or by mid-2010, but eventually the date was postponed to late 2011.  However, another change to the deadline cannot be ruled out.

The causes of delays in construction of this strategically important railway were changes to the direction of the track on a number of sections of the route, problems with buying the land and the compilation of revised projects and cost sheets.  Technical problems also greatly delayed the construction work:  in particular, it turned out that the position of a 2.6-km tunnel on the Georgian-Turkish border was wrongly chosen; it was in an area at high risk of avalanches.  A new tunnel project had to be developed, which naturally took additional time.

The ultimate deadline is 2012!

During the recent meeting in Baku, the Azerbaijani, Turkish and Georgian transport ministers signed protocols on acceleration of work on the BTK project.  "We agreed with the Georgian side to raise the volume of completed work on construction of the new railway and rehabilitation of the old one to 50%.  A few days ago, we sent about 25 additional pieces of road building hardware to Georgia.  If the schedule is observed, all work on the Georgian section might be completed by late 2011.  But in the event of unforeseen circumstances, completion of the project might be delayed till 2012 at the latest," Azerbaijani Transport Minister Ziya Mammadov said during the meeting.

The same unfortunate tunnel on the Georgian-Turkish border (on the Kars-Akhalkalaki section) might become one cause for delay on the Georgian section of the railway.  The tunnel is to be built through hard basalt formations, which slows down drilling work significantly and might require extra investment in the future.  As for other sections of the Marabda-Kartsakhi railway, in principle, the construction of the 29.2-km Marabda-Tetritsqaro stretch will be completed by early next year.  The Tetritsqaro-Tsalka section of the railway will be built first, then the Tsalka-Akhalkalaki section, the Kartsakhi station and finally the Akhalkalaki station will be built.  By late 2011, the reconstruction of several sections adjacent to the trunk road will be completed, a wheel handling, service and maintenance depot will be built on the border with Turkey and modernization of 160 kilometres of the Georgian railway from Tbilisi to Akhalkalaki will be completed.

By late 2011 or mid-2012, the 68-km section from Kars to the Georgian border will be completed, and the tunnel in the mountains will be completed at roughly the same time, so that both sections of the railway will be connected by the end of that year.  It has to be said that the Turkish side of the project is also being built in the very difficult geological conditions of mountain terrain; nonetheless, considerable success has been achieved here.  "On the Turkish section, 34% of the work has been completed and 75% of all the work planned will be completed by the end of this year.  The most difficult part will be building the 4-km section on the border across the mountains," Turkish Transport Minister Binali Yildirim stressed.

At any rate, the corridor will be put into operation no later than 2012, and Azerbaijan will need to increase the capacity of its railways in the western direction accordingly, to ensure the unimpeded passage of increased volumes of cargo.  For this purpose, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev approved the four-year State Programme of Development of Azerbaijani Railways.  The project, with a $795-million budget, envisages the reconstruction of the railway on the 500-km section from Baku to Boyuk-Kasik (on the border with Georgia) first and foremost a 317-km section, as well as renewal of rolling stock.  Some of the money will be supplied by the Government, but most of the investment will be allocated by the World Bank, which issued a $450-million loan to Azerbaijani Railways in December 2009.  Implementation of this project will make it possible to achieve one of the main goals - increasing the average speed of trains to 100 kilometres per hour for passenger trains and 80 kilometres per hour for cargo trains.

Aiming at 17 million tons of cargo

The most important objective for participants in the BTK project is to attract enough cargo and passengers for the new corridor.  To do this, during the 6th Meeting of the Azerbaijani-Georgian Intergovernmental Commission, the sides agreed to create a Coordinating Council for Transport.  They also signed a memorandum on increasing the competitiveness of the BTK transport corridor and created a working group tasked with attracting additional cargo turnover for the route.  "The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, which is being created by applying our combined efforts, will not only connect Turkey with the South Caucasus, but will also become a bridge between Central Asia, China and Europe, as well as the Near East.  The BTK will form a modern core of the Great Silk Road, so within one year after the road is put into operation, we expect to transport more than 1 million passengers and 6 million tons of cargo.  The traffic will increase every year," Turkish Transport Minister B. Yildirim stressed.  He said that in the future, this figure will increase to 17 million tons. China, in particular, has already voiced its agreement to transport 10 million tons of cargo along the corridor annually.

According to the plan, the BTK corridor will be used to transport mainly dry cargoes to Europe - ferrous and non-ferrous metals, coal, sulphur, cotton and other raw materials and prefabricated products from Central Asia - as well as container cargoes, mostly consumer goods from China.  Goods (textiles and other customer products) from manufacturers in Southern Europe, Turkey and Near East will be sent in the opposite direction for addressees in Georgia and Azerbaijan and on by sea to the markets of Central Asian countries.  Naturally, to make the BTK corridor attractive, Baku, Tbilisi and Ankara will have to implement a much more effective transport strategy, improve infrastructure and capacity, especially at border crossings and, most importantly, agree on efficient cross-border tariffs and harmonize their transit laws.

A railway breakthrough for Naxcivan

As the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars project is implemented, Azerbaijan is developing plans for the construction of a Kars-Igdir-Naxcivan railway, whose technical projection was sent recently by the Transport Ministry to Turkish partners for consideration.  To all appearances, the Turkish partners will support our country in this project and, according to Turkish Transport Minister Binali Yildirim, after the launch of the BTK, work might begin to connect the railways of the Autonomous Republic of Naxcivan (ARN) with Turkish railways.

The idea of connecting ARN railways with Azerbaijan or Turkey was aired back in the early 1990s.  After the Karabakh war, the ARN enclave found itself under total blockade:  all the railways and motorways were cut off from the mainland.  Back then, three options were considered to unblock the railways of the autonomous republic.  One of the projects envisaged using the border rail junction in Culfa:  trains could go to Iran that way.  Naturally, this would require the building of a new 250-km section of track which would run parallel to the railway section which existed during the Soviet period, running along the left bank of the Araz river on the territory of Zangezur and on across the now-occupied Zangilan, Cabrayil and Fuzuli districts.  This railway would connect the one in the area of Iran which borders on Naxcivan with the railways in our country near the Beylaqan junction.  However, Iran does not have a well-developed railway infrastructure in the immediate vicinity of the border with Azerbaijan.  And, most importantly, proposals by Azerbaijani rail men did not arouse interest in Tehran because of the technical difficulty of building railways in mountainous areas and the uneconomic nature of the project.  The small amounts of cargo turnover to the ARN and back are not sufficient to recover the expense of building the railway, or to pay Iran for transit expenses.

The second option envisaged connecting to Culfa by building the new railway much farther south, touching on the border town of Astara.  It is significant that at the turn of the century, this option had many supporters thanks to Moscow's and Tehran's plans to implement a North-South trans-regional transport project.  The project envisaged connecting Russian, Azerbaijani and Iranian railways, but it has been nine years now and it is still going through phases of approvals and discussions; alas, there are no grounds to expect that construction work will begin soon.

This is probably why the Azerbaijani Government tends towards the third option for lifting the siege of the ARN: building a railway to Turkey.  This idea is also nothing new:  the feasibility was considered more than once when the Sadarak motorway bridge was built, connecting Naxcivan with the Igdir vilayet in Turkey.  However, the technical difficulties here were the same as with Culfa.  The final destination of the railways in north-eastern Turkey is Kars, and to connect it with the ARN, it was necessary to build more than 300 kilometres of railway across the Igdir vilayet on very rugged mountain terrain.  This task has become considerably easier with the launch of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway: a 76-km railway branch is being built in Turkey from Kars to the Georgian border and, on the eastern end of this branch, a section is to be built to Naxcivan.  And in the ARN itself, only a 7-km section is to be built in the Sadarak District.

Azerbaijani railway specialists have already prepared the preliminary calculations for the Kars-Igdir-Naxcivan trunk railway - they were sent to the Turkish side for discussion.  "At present, the Turkish side is studying its section to prepare a feasibility study," said Deputy Transport Minister Musa Panaxov.  After the implementation of the new international transit project, Naxcivan will no longer be under blockade and will eventually become one of the largest transport hubs in the region.