Tehran Office to Follow Up South-West Transport Corridor

The office for a working group tasked with following up the South-West Transport Corridor will be established in Tehran, an official with the Islamic Republic of Iran Railways said.

Hossein Ashouri was also quoted as saying by IRNA that the office will study ways of facilitating the launch of the corridor and remove obstacles to goods transportation on the international route.

The South-West Transport Corridor was publicized after a meeting was held by the representatives of the national rail bodies of Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine and Poland in Baku on Monday.

The participating states planned the transportation of 200,000 tons of cargo by the end of 2017 via the newly-proposed transit corridor that stretches from India to the Black Sea and Europe.

According to Ashouri, the multimodal route 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.

Currently, 72 million tons of goods are shipped from India to Europe and 25 billion tons are transported vise versa every year.