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56 I Eurasia bne February 2018
Caucasus “golden triangle” cooperation steams ahead
Clare Nuttall in Bucharest
Afull decade after the agreement to build the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway was signed, the line was ceremonially opened at the port of Alyat near the Azeri capital
on October 30. The 826km railway connects Azerbaijan’s Caspian coast to Turkey via Georgia, and, as top offi- cials from the participating countries stressed at the launch, will consider- ably cut travel time between China and Western Europe.
Construction of the BTK railway, which was not without its difficulties, was
the product of the long-lasting and wide-reaching collaboration between Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. Forged by geopolitics, the alliance between
the three countries has resulted in commercial ties which have steadily strengthened with the completion of successive trilateral mega projects, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the
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Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline and now the BTK railway. Indeed the three- pointed cooperation has sometimes been referred to as a “golden triangle” of trade and investment in a part of the world where political strife has often derailed economic cooperation.
Finally completed, the new line runs from Alyat across Azerbaijan to the Georgian capital then on to Kars in eastern Turkey.
The line forms part of a wider transport route that runs from the Khorgos pass on Kazakhstan’s border with China across to the Caspian Sea, where ferries run from Kazakhstan’s Aktau port to Alyat. At its western end, it links to Turkey’s existing rail infrastructure, and then on to Europe.
Speaking at the opening ceremony – where he switched the points alongside his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip
“The geostrategic location of our countries gives us a unique possibility to serve as
a bridge connecting Europe and Asia”
Its initial capacity is 1mn passengers and 5mn tonnes of freight a year, but there are plans to boost this as high as 3mn passen- gers and 17mn tonnes of freight by 2034.
Erdogan and the prime ministers of Georgia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to allow the first trains to roll along the line – the project’s initiator Azeri President