Neat article from Bloomberg News about Afghan railway.  It is their first rail line and is scheduled to be complete by the end of the calendar year.  It is hard to explain how under-developed most of Afghanistan is.  I was able to visit where the railway will start on the Uzbek border at the Afghanistan town of Hairiton in March.  Will put some photos below.

Interesting about potential Iranian line to Herat and that ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks are not sympathetic to Taliban at all.  Line from Hairiton to Masar-e-Shariff scheduled to complete by end of calendar year.

Afghan Railway to Aid Economy and NATO, Rile Taliban Bloomberg News, May 2010

 LINK

HIGHLIGHTS

The railway, being built by Uzbekistan’s state railroad, will run 75 kilometers (45 miles) from the Uzbek border to the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, said Craig Steffensen, Kabul-based Afghanistan country director for the Asian Development Bank, who has inspected the work.

The link to Uzbekistan and onward to Kazakhstan and Russia also will reduce the dependence of Afghanistan and of U.S.-led NATO forces on Pakistan, where local Taliban have hijacked or burned trucks carrying U.S. military supplies.

The railway will connect to a new U.S. supply network from the north and so “will be particularly helpful in bringing goods into the country for our needs,” said U.S. Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman in Kabul for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s International Security Assistance Force.

Thus the Taliban plan to strike, said movement spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, in a mobile-phone interview. “If NATO uses this railroad to import their supplies we will attack them 100 percent, and we’ll block the railroad,” he said.

That may be difficult. The rail line passes west of the Pashtun districts in the north that the Taliban, a movement of ethnic Pashtuns, recently have taken over.

Ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks who live nearer the line are “not sympathetic,” to the Taliban, said Zabi Wahab, a native of the region who is the business development manager at the Dubai- based Kefayat Group.

This sign is right on the border of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.  The railway is about 10 yards to my left and will show in below photos.  March 2010

This bridge is where the rail line extends from Uzbekistan into Afghanistan.  It is about 50 feet from the sign in the above photo.  This picture is from our visit.  German security detail in front and my Boss meeting with the Hairiton mayor.

This is me on the other side of the bridge looking into Hairiton.

When we were there, the rail line stopped about a mile down the road south into Hairiton.  Containers were downloaded off the rail cars by forklift or RTCH (rough terrain container handler, pronounced rech like throw-up).  Once downloaded, they are shipped by truck.