Anzali Port to Be Connected to National Railroad

“The route has been studied and designed. Once Anzali Port is connected to Rasht-Anzali Railroad, multimodal transportation can take place,” the official was quoted as saying by the news portal of the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development.

Head of the Ports and Maritime Organization of wwwIran Mohammad Rastad said on Sunday the construction of this linkup rail route will begin before the current year is out.Located along the International North-South Transport Corridor, Anzali is expected to become Iran’s leading transit Caspian port in the coming years. 

Expansion plans for the port’s facilities are underway to make it the largest in the Caspian Sea with 22 berths and cargo handling capacity of 15 million tons per year, according to Financial Tribune.

The International North-South Transport Corridor, a 7,200-km multimodal network of ship, rail and road routes, is a major transit route designed to facilitate the transportation of goods from Mumbai in India to Helsinki in Finland, using Iranian ports and railroads, which the Islamic Republic plans to connect to those of Azerbaijan and Russia. The corridor will connect Iran with Russia’s Baltic ports and give Russia rail connectivity to both the Persian Gulf and the Indian rail network. This means goods could be carried from Mumbai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and further to Baku. They could then pass across the Russian border into Astrakhan and then proceed to Moscow and St. Petersburg, before entering Europe. INSTC would substantially cut the travel time for everything from Asian consumer goods to Central Eurasia’s natural resources to boost European exports. It is estimated to reduce the time and cost of transportation of goods between India and Europe from 40 to 15 days. 

The corridor is said to have the potential of diverting up to 10 million tons of India-Europe trade to the route.