Kars–Gyumri–Tbilisi railway

The Kars–Gyumri–Tbilisi railway line is a railway line that runs from the city of Kars in Turkey to the Armenian city of Gyumri, then from there on to Tbilisi, Georgia.

Originally completed in 1899, the railway was highly important during the Soviet era, both as the only direct rail link between Turkey and the USSR (Kars-Gyumri), and one of the two main railway connections between Armenia and other Soviet Republics (Gymri-Tbilisi). While the Gyumri-Tbilisi section remains Armenia's lifeline to the outside world, the Kars-Gymri section has not been operational since 1993, when Turkey following the Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan closed the border with Armenia in support for the Azeris in the war with Armenia.

Since the Kars–Gymri section has not been in operation due to the closed Turkish-Armenian border, in April 2005, an agreement was signed to build a direct connection across the Turkish-Georgian border from Kars to Georgia's Akhalkalaki, and to rehabilitate the existing railways from Akhalkalaki to Tbilisi to Baku, this creating the Kars–Tbilisi–Baku mainline. The European Union and the United States declined to assist in the financing or promoting of the new mainline because they saw it as designed to bypass Armenia, supporting instead the reopening of the Kars-Gyumri-Tbilisi railroad.

The railway was built in the late 19th century, when Georgia and Armenia, as well as the recently conquered Kars Oblast, all were parts of Russian Empire. By the late 1880s, the railway system of Russian Transcaucasia consisted of the mainline from Poti and Batum on the Black Sea to Tiflis (now Tbilisi) to Baku on the Caspian Sea, ran by the Transcaucasian Railway.

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