In 2007 equipment for the German military at Mazar-e-Sharif was sent by rail from Berlin to Hayratan, taking 28 to 32 days to cover around 6000 km via Poland, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
STUTE unterstützt Bundeswehr mit kompetenter Transportlogistik (PDF) is a German-language article about it published by STUTE.
A report from the Gulf Times of 31 August 2008.
German army proposes new Afghan rail link
The German military is considering building a railway line in northern Afghanistan to ease transport of Nato supplies to the country and boost economic activity in the area, a German news magazine reported yesterday.
Apart from a short stretch from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan has almost no functioning railways, with less than 25km of track in the entire country. A number of railways leading towards Afghanistan stop short of the border.
The proposed 67km stretch would link the northern city of Mazar-I-Sharif with the Uzbek town of Termez, where the German air force has a base, Der Spiegel magazine reported.
Germany currently has an agreement with Moscow permitting it to transport supplies via rail through Russia to Afghanistan. The new link would greatly ease supplies to Germany’s biggest Afghan base at Mazar-i-Sharif.
The cost of the proposed railway has not been calculated but the military is hoping for financial contributions from Germany’s development agency and from international organisations, stressing the economic benefits, Spiegel said.
The line would connect with an existing Soviet-built rail and road bridge crossing the Amu Darya River which separates the Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. The bridge, built in 1982, was closed by the Taliban in 1997 after they took control of the area and was reopened in late 2001.
Germany and Uzbekistan signed a transit agreement on 4 March 2008.
Update: Here is the original article in Der Spiegel: Bundeswehr plant den Bau einer Bahnlinie in Afghanistan (German army plans to build a railway line in Afghanistan), dated August 30.
Speaking to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation’s Heads of State Summit in Colombo last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said
As part of the contract with a Chinese consortium for the exploration of the Aynak copper deposit, a railway line will be constructed which will connect Central Asia to South Asia, thereby expediting the transport of people and goods within the region and beyond.
The suggestions of passenger transport, and a through north-south link, are interesting.
The project was announced last November. A consortim of China Metallurgical Group Corporation and Jiangxi Copper Co would build a railway line from the town of Hairatan on the Amu Darya bordering Uzbekistan, through Logar and to Torkham on the Pakistan border to export the minerals
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Here are some links to various articles on the Friendship Bridge, which carries the railway from Termiz/Termez in Uzbekistan, over the Amu Darya river to a freight terminal at Hairaton/Hayraton/(and various other transliterations) in Afghanistan. The nearest town to the Uzbek end is Mangusar.
U.S. Army Civil Affairs personnel visit the Termez bridge to assess its usability for supporting the transport of humanitarian aid from Uzbekistan, to the northern provinces of Afghanistan, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, Dec. 18, 2001. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo)
War Zones for Idiots describes American Tom Bissell’s journey into Afghanistan over the Friendship bridge: A trim two-lane span with shallow train tracks running down the center, the bridge was splendid, solid, clean - until we came to its indisputably Afghan side. Suddenly graffiti streaked along the girders, all of it scrawled in indecipherable Arabic-alphabet Persian.
Travelling from Termez, he found
A converse silhouette of crosshatched white girders, the bridge was perhaps five hundred yards from where we stood. Before us a grassy bay of thigh-high vegetation swung back and forth in the breeze. A quarter-mile away, on the other side of the motionless Amu Darya River—as unremarkable as I imagined the view of North Dakota might appear from South Dakota—was Afghanistan.
Some cows, looking legless in the tall grass, drank from pools of swampy standing water near the river, which was itself blocked off with electrified fence and cyclonic coils of barbed wire. Michael thought that some great photos of the Friendship Bridge could be snapped from deeper in the field, and convinced me to follow him.
“Nyet, nyet!” our driver Sobir yelled. We turned, already up to our knees in the grass. He began calling out a single word in Russian while performing an ominous-looking hand motion. I asked Michael what this word meant. He said nothing, his mouth squirming thoughtfully within his blond goatee. He looked at his feet, and then around them.
“He’s saying,” Michael began, “that there are landmines here.”
In this travel blog tourists leave Afghanistan in 2007. Includes a photo of the deck showing the railway.
There is photo of the Russians leaving in 1989 (here is a news report from the Guardian archive), and also a rug design possibly inspired by the bridge, on an Australian website which has almost everything you could possibly need to know about Afghan War Rugs [now there is something which conjures up a strange image - coming next, the Doormats of Mass Destruction?].
A news article on reopening of the bridge in 2001.
Photo, collection of five pictures of the bridge area. I think the armoured vehicles in the river could be BTR-70s, but identification of drowned military kit isn’t exactly my speciality.
An article in Dawn dated May 14, 2006 quotes M H A Beg visiting Central Asia to follow Babar’s passage from the Amu Darya to Nilab:
Babar must have crossed the river Amu somewhere near Termiz. This is the famous crossing site of men and armies. The most famous in recent history being the Russian army of 1979 through the Bridge of Friendship, named in contrast to the act of invasion.
The bridge still stands. It is used by the trade traffic. Not only does it have a road but also a railway crossing from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan. To establish a station for unloading goods, they built a town named Hayratan, a dismal place with a railway yard and some houses belonging to the railway workers and army personnel. The town is so recent that it doesn’t even show on some of the older maps of Afghanistan. These days you cannot go on the bridge directly, but a guard will direct you to a place from where the bridge and Amu Darya are within sight.
The bridge is a steel construction, painted pale yellow on the top. Amu is a big river in the region, made famous in Arabic historical writings as the “Nehar”. Arab historians have given the area beyond a name so beautiful and descriptive, “Mavara-un-nehar”. The railway does not go beyond Hayratan. This is the only part of Afghanistan where there is a railway built by the invading Russians. It is their legacy.
Babar writes in his book that after crossing the Amu on a raft, he landed in Afghan Turkistan where he was greeted by vast flat grasslands.
Fuel Line Vol. 3, 2006 from Defense Energy Support has an article “Voruz Earns Bronze Star Thanks to Many Logistics Professionals”. This describes removing a vast quantity of fuel from a US base in Uzbekistan to one in Afghanistan in a hurry during 2005, by rail and lorry. There is a small photo of railway tracks at Hayratan.
Photos of a train crossing the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan border, taken by Australian humanitarian relief worker Liz Johnson. The loco is an Uzbek Railways’ TEM2 diesel, built at the Bryansk Engineering Works in Russia to a design which evolved from some US Alco locos supplied to the USSR under the World War II lend-lease scheme.
The website of the UAE-based Azizi Hotak General Trading Group has some December 2007 photographs of rail operations at Hairaton terminal in Afghanistan, showing Uzbek Railways’ loco TEM2 3199.
The address by Uzbekistan’s President at the NATO Summit in Bucharest on April 3 2008 mentions rail access on the Uzbek Railways line to Afghanistan.
Taking this opportunity, I would like to state that Uzbekistan stands ready to discuss and sign with NATO the Agreement on providing for corridor and transit through its territory to deliver the non-military cargos through the border junction Termez-Khayraton, practically the sole railway connection with Afghanistan.
At the same time, the sovereign interests on maintaining the security and legislation of our country must be observed.
The agreement on railway transit of Bundeswehr cargos through the territory of Uzbekistan signed by Uzbekistan with the German side on March 4 this year could be taken as basis for the future Agreement.
An agreement has also been reached “to allow the alliance to ship non-lethal freight across Russian territory to military forces in Afghanistan”
Some more photos of Hatyratan, taken by Donald Hill.
On Flikr is a collection of photos of the terminal at Hairatan, taken between 16 August and 6 October 2007 by Donald Hill, an American working at the Uzbekistan border importing jet fuel for US and coalition forces.
One photo shows part of a railway siding, another sunset over the Friendship bridge.
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