Railway development is quite costly and over $27 billion in infrastructure investment is required to transfer 20 percent of freight and passenger traffic from road to rail by 2025, Abbas Akhundi, minister of roads and urban development, said. “About 400 of the 2,000 existing old passenger cars should be discarded and replaced by 2,400 new ones,” he said. “Each new passenger car costs 40 billion rials ($1.4 million at official exchange rate) and renovating the old passenger cars requires between 80 ($2.9 billion) and 100 trillion rials ($3.6 million).”
