On July 5 a train left the Chinese city of Lanzhou with 39 containers of goods, including auto parts, furniture, office supplies and medical equipment. A unit train, it will travel to Kashgar, where the containers will be loaded onto trucks, which will carry them to a railroad terminal in Kyrgyzstan, which will then rail-ship them to Afghanistan’s Hairatan, just over the Uzbekistan border.
The successful opening of this freight route will further strengthen the economic and trade cooperation and exchanges among China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and other countries along the Belt and Road, according to a company that operates the transport service.
Building a rail corridor through Kyrgyzstan has been on the agenda for years, but a new commitment to build it was made at the China-Central Asia Summit on May 19 in Xi’an.
This week’s opening of a new scheduled train route between China and Afghanistan, via Kyrgyzstan (truck) and Uzbekistan, is a follow-on to the successful trial runs of trains from back in September 2022. A pilot shipment of 10 containers was trucked from China’s Kashgar, Xinjiang Province, to the city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan, and then proceeded by rail across Uzbekistan into Afghanistan. The new route will cut the time of freight shipments from China to Afghanistan down from two months (by sea, then via Pakistan) to 18 days at present, and eventually below two weeks. (https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2022/eirv49n37-20220923/eirv49n37-20220923_015-sco_samarkand_summit_demonstrate.pdf )
