Torghundi rail terminal in 1960

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

A photo of a page of an unknown bilingual book showing photos of the “railhead at Torghandi” and the construction of a “Torghundi-Kandahar concrete highway”. Someone has added “1960” to the electronic image; presumably the date of the book.

The railway across the Afghan border from the USSR (now Turkmenistan) might have been built as part of the USSR – Herat – Kandahar road project.

Anyone know the name of the book?

Chinese transit goods arrive at Hairatan

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

The 1st shipment of Chinese commercial-transit goods arrives at Hairatan port

The 1st shipment of Chinese commercial and transit goods arrived at the commercial port of Hairatan on Sunday.

This shipment includes 51 containers of commercial-transit goods of the People’s Republic of China, which entered the country through the railway for the 1st time in the solar year.

The cargo was loaded from the Chinese city of Urumqi and the Afghan Cargo Company transited the shipment to Hairatan port.

Officials at the port say, the shipment includes electrical appliances, medicine and cosmetics, various types of clothes, toys, and other commercial goods, and the transfer of commercial goods from Hairatan port indicates an improvement in the country’s ports.

Afghanistan shares a 137-kilometer border with the Republic of Uzbekistan, where most of Afghanistan’s trade goods enter the country through the port of Hairatan. Hairatan port is one of the connecting points of the country with Central Asia.

Source: Ministry of Industry and Commerce, 15 July 2021

Consultancy services for detailed survey and design or Torghondi – Herat railway

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

Kabul – Darulaman railway locomotive photo

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

Another photograph of one of the Henschel steam locomotives on the Kabul – Darulaman railway has been found, in the book “Джанг: Восстание в Афганистане” (War: Uprising in Afghanistan) by journalist Евгений Шуан (Yevgeniy Shuan) which was published in Leningrad in 1930.

Steam locomotive in Kabul
AFGHANISTAN’S ONLY STEAM TRAIN (RUNS BETWEEN KABUL AND DAR-UL-AMAN).

The picture was spotted by Markus Hauser, who alerted me to it. His full thread is worth a read, with a lot of interesting pictures of 1920s Afghanistan from the book.

Karkar coal mine photo

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

The BBC’s Middle East correspondent tweets a picture of the coal mine at Karkar, with the narrow gauge railway just visible; ignore the text about the “soviet field gun artillery piece gun” in the tweet, that is part of joke thread about the media calling any armoured vehicle a tank.