ANKARA, Jan 9 (XINHUA/APP): Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday inaugurated a high-speed rail line connecting the provinces of Konya and Karaman in central Anatolia.
“We are determined to make Turkey a center country in railway transportation, like many other fields, by rapidly completing our current investments,” the president said at the opening ceremony in a train station in Konya, a major city in south-central Turkey.
The Konya-Karaman rail line will be one of the “important stages of the south axis of this big project,” he said.
Turkey will save 63 million Turkish liras (about 4.8 million U.S. dollars) annually with this line, the president said adding that the 102-km line will reduce the journey between the two cities to 50 minutes.
He emphasized that the problems experienced in the sea and air freight transportation during the pandemic highlighted the railways as a serious alternative.
Erdogan said the length of the railways in Turkey has reached 13,222 km under his government, and Turkey plans to further extend these lines.
Turkey will increase its railway investments, the country’s Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Adil Karaismailoglu said earlier.
Briefing the Turkish parliament on his ministry’s investment plans for transportation, Karaismailoglu said on Oct. 19 that the government had increased the share of the railway in Turkey’s investments from 33 percent in 2013 to 48 percent in 2021 and this rate will be 63.4 percent in 2023.
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