Русский
The first fully-fledged Agroexpress train, carrying oat flakes and cereals has been sent from the Yuzhnouralsky Transport and Logistics Center in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region to India’s Mundra Port in Mumbai via the eastern route of the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), the press service of the State Transport Leasing Company has announced.
The Agroexpress route is a co-ordinated, international routing that is intended to service goods between Russia and Asia, including to China. On this occasion, the train will pass from Russia to Kazakhstan, and onto Sarahs in Turkmenistan. From there the containers will be reloaded onto track 1435 and will proceed through Iran to Bandar Abbas Port and then by sea to Mundra.
The planned travel time to the destination port is 35 days. The train was sent by Russian Railways Logistics JSC and includes 31 twenty-foot containers.
According to estimates, the volume of agricultural goods transported along this transport corridor may reach 100,000 tonnes per year.
Continuous rail connections with countries such as Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Iran through Kazakhstan, as well as additional prospects for organizing cargo transportation to the countries of the Persian Gulf and Africa, provide new opportunities for Russian exporters to sell their products in alternative markets.
Since March 2023, Russian Railways has begun sending container trains along the INSTC from the Chelyabinsk-Gruzovaya station, which is part of the South Ural Railway. This has included rail to Iran as well as to Saudi Arabia.
The INSTC is a multimodal route for transporting passengers and cargo, with a total length from St. Petersburg to Mumbai of 7,200 km. A significant part of it passes through Russian railways infrastructure, which, depending on the route, accounts for 33-53% of the total length of the land part of the corridor. The main goal of the development of the route is to serve Russian foreign trade with the Transcaucasus, the Caspian region, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia.
