Kazakhstan’s national railways company Kazakhstan Temir Zholy says that 200 container trains from China have passed through the Kazakh port of Aktau since the beginning of 2024, compared to 11 trains last year. The Aktau port is a transit hub on the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), also known as the Middle Corridor.
The TITR is an international multimodal transport corridor that spans for 11,000 km from China to Europe via Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Black Sea, and Turkey.
The 200th container train arrived in the port of Aktau last week from the Kazakh terminal in Xi’an (China). From Aktau, it will head for Azerbaijan on a barge across the Caspian Sea.
Opened in February 2024, the Kazakh terminal in the dry port of Xi’an consolidates cargo from various provinces of China, accounting for 40% of all container trains heading towards Kazakhstan and contributing to a significant increase in transit cargo traffic along the TITR.
In 2023, 2.8 million tons of cargo were transported along the TITR, compared to about 1.7 million tons in 2022. In the first 7 months of 2024, the traffic totaled 2.56 million tons. By 2027, the capacity of the TITR is planned to increase to 10 million tons.
