Are there continuous rail connections from India to Central Asia or Europe?

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Are there continuous rail connections from India to Central Asia or Europe?

July 19, 2019, 12:35 PM

Ignoring political and practical problems in actually using such connections for passenger services, as of 2009 or so the answer is Yes!! There are continuous physical railway connections from easternmost India all the way to the UK. Read on…

From Quetta in Pakistan, the Nushki Extension Railway runs through Mirjaveh (Mirjawa) on the border to Zahidan (Zahedan, also known as Duzdap) in Iran on 5’6″ gauge. (It passes close by the live Kuh-i-Taftan (Koh-i-Taftan) volcano.) This line was constructed started from Spezand Jn. near Quetta to Nushki in 1905. Extension work continued from 1917, reaching Zahidan by 1922 (1918?), covering 704km (440 miles).

Trains have been running intermittently on this section towards Zahidan from Pakistan from about 1918. By the 1930s only the first 350km (219 miles) were in use and most of the remainder was dismantled. It was then rebuilt in 1942 as a route for Allied war material to reach the USSR. The line is a BG line. Because of moving sand dunes common in the area which often cover the railway line, at many places the line is built with duplicate stretches; the crew chooses the branches that are not covered (or are less covered) by sand.

After 1942 too, passenger services operated intermittently. Later a weekly passenger service was begun, which used to take 38 hours, an average of about 19km/h. Track maintenance and station crews are Iranian for about the last 50 miles to Zahidan (since about 1967), but the rest of the link is operated by Pakistan Railways. The Taftan Express and one other service now run regularly from Quetta in Pakistan. Currently [5/01] it runs on the 1st and 5th of every month from Quetta and returns on the 3rd and 17th of every month from Zahidan. The journey takes 31 hours. The usual motive power is a Quetta shed Alco DL-500 all the way to Zahidan. Because of the remoteness of the line, a spare loco is kept on the branch about 12 hours out of Zahidan.

However, from Zahidan, onward connections to Kerman and beyond in Iran were not in place for several decades, until about 2009. This was the big “missing link” of a potential UK-India route. West of Kerman is the main Iranian network, which is all standard gauge, 4’8½”. It has connections to Central Asia (via Mashhad through Sarakhs on the border to Turkmenistan, with a gauge change to CIS broad gauge of 1520mm), with connections to Tashkent / Dushanbe / Ashkhabad, etc. ([4/00] Freight service exists; passenger service reportedly begun or soon to begin.) Iran also has connections to Europe via Turkey (from Tabriz through Razi on the border to Ankara; there is a ferry across Lake Van in eastern Turkey and another across the Hellespont), and north through Azerbaijan (via Jolfa on the border to Baku, Erevan, etc.).

This last missing section in Iran was intermittently under construction in the 1990s and planned to be completed by 2002 or so but construction went on for quite a while until the Kerman – Bam and Bam – Shur Gaz sections were completed on June 9, 2009. Passenger services on the Zahedan – Bam section were opened in September 2010 by Iran Railways. A demonstration train with container freight left Islamabad in Pakistan on August 14, 2009, on a two-week trip to Turkey, with the containers being transhipped to standard gauge bogies at Zahedan. With the completion of the Kerman to Zahidan link in Iran, one can theoretically (very theoretically!) ride the rails (with changes due to differences in gauge) from the UK all the way to Assam! Note that Iran Railways have started running passenger services on the new Bam-Zahedan section as of September 2010.

Afghanistan has no railways (*see Note below), so there are no links onwards to Central Asia in that direction. On the Pakistan side the BG line of the former Khyber Railway reaches Landi Khana (2km from the border). The Khyber Railway line starts from Peshawar Cantt. The section up to Landi Kotal was completed in 1925 and the remaining section (a downward incline with ruling gradient of 1:25) from Landi Kotal to Landi Khana in 1926. Tracks further from Landi Khana to the border post (2km) were built but never used.

Also in Pakistan, the BG line of the former Chaman Extension Railway reaches Chaman, where the buffer stops are about 200 yards short of the Afghan border. This was part of the ambitiously planned Kandahar State Rly. which was to have reached Kandahar in Afghanistan from Ruk on the Indus State Rly. The Chaman extension starts from Bostan, north of Quetta. The construction of the Chaman line involved the completion, in 1891, of the Khojak tunnel, then the longest railway tunnel in British India. Update [11/03] A news report from Pakistan Railways suggests that a new railway line from Chaman to Kandahar has been proposed; the projected completion date is 2010.

A 15km 1.524m gauge (CIS broad gauge) spur runs from Termiz (Termez) in Uzbekistan into Afghanistan, terminating at the Kheyrabad transshipment point on the south bank of the Amu Darya. Termiz is connected – via the ‘Friendship Bridge’ over the Amu Darya, to the rest of the CIS (ex-Soviet) railway network, westwards via Turkmenistan and onwards to Quarshi, Bukhara, and Samarkand, as well as eastwards to Dushanbe in Tajikistan. A 9.6km spur, also of CIS broad gauge, runs from Gushgy (Kushka) in Turkmenistan to Towraghondi in Afghanistan; Gushgy is also on the CIS network. These spurs were built by the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan.

[5/10] A new project has been started, with the help of a grant from the Asian Development Bank, to extend the spur from Termez in Uzbekistan all the way to Mazar-i-Sharif (approximately 75km). It is projected to be completed by September 2010. Future plans for this line include an envisioned extension to Herat and then connections eastward to Iran as well.

In the past there was a 32km stretch of MG track laid by the British from the north-west territory in what is now Pakistan towards Afghanistan along the Kabul valley and turning westwards towards the Loi Shilman valley. This was dismantled in 1909.

Andrew Grantham has written an exhaustive account of Afghanistan’s railways – built and proposed.

Note: Earlier this page erroneously claimed that this line entered Afghanistan. Loi Shilman, however, is within modern-day Pakistan. The error is regretted.

[* Note: There were some locomotives (diesel-hydraulics, 600mm gauge) delivered to Afghanistan in the past for power plants and dams. There was a steam tramway built from Kabul to Darulaman, which used two Henschel steam locomotives; the line was not in use for long.]

See below for some more recent news on proposals for railway links with Afghanistan.

India is a signatory to an agreement among several Central Asian countries, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and others, for interconnecting their rail systems to provide connections from the interior (Russia, Central Asia) to major sea ports and into the Indian subcontinent. The initial project is dubbed “NOSTRAC” (North-South Transport Corridor). So far [4/00] this has mostly been a lot of talk without any real work.

Another proposed pan-Asian project is “TAR”, the Trans-Asian Railway. This is a proposal under the aegis of ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) to which India also belongs, under the Asian Land Transport Infrastructure Development (ALTID) project. The TAR project envisions three Asian rail corridors, a northern one, a central one, and a southern one, to link southern China and south-east Asia with Europe.

The proposed termini for the routes are Kunming in China, Bangkok in Thailand, and Kapikule in Bulgaria. The route from Thailand is supposed to go through Myanmar, enter India at Tamu (in Manipur), go through Bangladesh at Mahisasan / Shahbazpur, and re-enter India at Gede. Subsidiary routes that are part of this project for pan-Asian connectivity include Haldia – Calcutta, Abdulpur – Rohanpur – Singhapur – Raxaul (Bangladesh-Nepal). On the other side the route from India goes through Pakistan and Iran to Turkey and from there to Bulgaria.

As with the NOSTRAC scheme, this has so far [4/00] been mostly a lot of proposals on paper. There is now [6/03] some more talk about a project to link India with south-east Asia (through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and ending in Hanoi in Vietnam) under the auspices of the Mekong Ganga Cooperation group.

[1/03] Recently China, Iran, and other countries have been discussing the possibility of constructing railway links between the Central Asian Republics, China, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. One proposal calls for a line from Gwadar port in Pakistan to Taftan via southern Baluchistan, Saindak, Reko Diq, and Dalbandin. China and Pakistan are also said to have agreed [7/04] to extend China’s East-West Railway 760km beyond the Chinese border city of Kashi into Pakistan, up to Peshawar. The Gawadar port is also being improved and given additional rail and road links [7/04] so that eventually this may become a major transit point for traffic for western China as well as for the Central Asian states.

Another proposal is the extension of a Pakistan Railways line from Chaman into southern Afghanistan including Kandahar and Herat, and then reaching Khushka in Tajikistan, which is already connected to the railway networks in Central Asia, or to Towraghondi, connecting to the short existing spur to Uzbekistan, or also to Shirkhan Bandar on the border with Tajikistan. The Karachi-Chaman mainline section of PR would also have to be upgraded, as would the Khushka-Gwadar link. Iran is also said to be interested in links to the PR network around Chagai (Saindak, Reko Diq). [5/07] Pakistan and Afghanistan have agreed upon a proposal to construct a 10.5km stretch of railway tracks from Chaman to Spin Boldak in Afghanistan in 2008-2009 which would be the first step in connecting to Kandahar and beyond. Separately there is work (at varying levels of planning or execution) on railway lines in Afghanistan, e.g., Hayratan – Mazar-i-Sharif, Aqina-Andkhoy.

Source – IFRCA.org

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