Astana, 29 August 2024 (TDI): The Kazakh government is working to implement the Roadmap to eliminate bottlenecks and develop the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR) until 2027 between Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Türkiye as well as between Kazakhstan and Georgia.
This will increase the route’s capacity to 10 million tons per year, the Prime Minister’s press service reported.
To ensure sufficient volume of transit cargo from East to West, Kazakhstan and China inked a number of deals on the TITR’s development in November, including China-Europe container trains, which were ratified on July 1.
A single multimodal service has been established along the route to increase competitiveness and appeal. A joint venture, Middle Corridor Multimodal, was formed at the Astana International Financial Centre, uniting the railway administrations of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Georgia to manage the route equally.
It focuses on digitizing and optimizing transport operations, such as terminal procedures and border crossings.
To improve the logistics service based on the “single window” principle, the IT systems of Kazakhstan Temir Zholy national railway company were integrated with the customs module of the Digital Trade Corridor platform named Tez Customs, developed by Global DTC Kazakhstan.
The roadmap for the interaction between KTZ and Global DTC Kazakhstan was approved on December 5 last year, to implement the DTC platform.
The information systems of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan’s railways have already been integrated into this platform, and Georgian railways are planned for next.
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Within the joint venture China-Kazakhstan Trade and Logistics Company, set up in 2023, a terminal was built in the dry port of Xi’an.
Opened on February 28, the terminal consolidates 40 percent of all container trains heading towards Kazakhstan, considerably boosting transit traffic along the TITR. As a result, the transit volume along the TITR from China has nearly doubled since the start of the year.
In 2023, the transportation volume along the TITR went up by 65 percent to 2.76 million tons, up from 1.7 million tons in 2022.
In the first seven months of the current year, this volume reached 2.56 million tons, a 63 percent increase from the same period in the previous year – 1.57 million tons.
