A second tunnel has been completed between Halkalı and Ispartakule in Istanbul. The tunnel is a relatively short piece of infrastructure in the country’s largest city Istanbul, but it is also part of a future high-speed rail line to Bulgaria that will facilitate freight traffic. The first tunnel was finished in November.
The tunnel is one out of three stages of the Istanbul – Bulgaria high-speed line, which will run between the Halkalı and Kapıkule rail freight hubs. Out of 229 kilometres of the route’s total length, the tunnel only occupies 8,4 kilometres between Halkalı and Ispartakule in Istanbul.
With the drilling of the second tunnel finished, 95 per cent of this section of the line is now completed, according to Turkish transport minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu. The remainder is supposed to be finished by August.
Throughput capacity
A 67-kilometre and 153-kilometre railway constitute the remaining two stages of the entire high-speed rail project. Türkiye aims for completion by the end of the year: “With the completion of all stages, we aim to increase the current line capacity by four times, and we plan to reduce passenger travel time from four hours to one hour and 30 minutes, and freight transportation time from eight hours to three and a half hours”, the transport minister said in November. Once finished, the line should have an annual throughput capacity of 33,5 million tonnes of freight.