Istanbul–Tehran–Islamabad railway
international freight train corridor
Istanbul–Tehran–Islamabad railway (commonly the ITI train) is an international freight rail corridor linking Islamabad, Tehran and Istanbul. The route connects Pakistan with the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey to provide an overland freight corridor between South Asia, West Asia and Europe. The service has operated intermittently since a trial run in 2009 and was restarted for a series of cargo runs in December 2021. Pakistan, Iran and Turkey have announced plans to resume regular operations again by the end of 2025.
Route and infrastructure
The ITI corridor runs from Islamabad and major Pakistani railheads (via Lahore, Sukkur and Quetta) across the Iran–Pakistan border at Taftan to Zahedan in Iran, continuing to Tehran and onwards into Turkey to Istanbul (and in some runs to Ankara). Total route length roughly at 6,560 km, depending on exact origin/destination terminals and routing.
There is a break-of-gauge between Iran Railways, Standard gauge (1435mm) and Pakistan Railways, 5 ft 6 in (1,676 mm) broad gauge at Zahedan. Containers are trans-shipped at the break-of-gauge. Proposals for improved transhipment terminals and gauge-changing facilities (VGA) have been discussed to speed up operations.
History
A trial freight service between Pakistan and Turkey via Iran ran in August 2009.
The public source identifies “Istanbul–Tehran–Islamabad railway” as international freight train corridor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Istanbul, Tehran and Islamabad.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5617163. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2021 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Istanbul–Tehran–Islamabad railway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.