Five million passengers use the Georgian Railway and many of them come through the Tbilisi Central Station in the national capital.

Five million passengers use the Georgian Railway and many of them come through the Tbilisi Central Station in the national capital.

The backbone of today’s Georgian Silk Route is the country’s great national railroad. State-owned Georgian Railway, under the leadership of Director General Akaki Chkhaidze, a highly respected 30-year veteran transportation executive, annually hauls 20 million tons of freight, moves five million passengers and returns a contribution of more than $50 million dollars to the State budget. 24,000 persons are employed by the system, with success being achieved in efforts to upgrade salaries and working conditions.

In the ten years since the national railroad split from the Soviet system Chkhaidze has led a massive modernization and self-sufficiency program. A visitor to the properties of the railway would encounter 16 factories, some huge, for the manufacture of locomotives and railroad cars, warehouses containing the industrial strength apparatus of rail, tie, electrical controls and every part of the complex modern system. 95 percent of the railroad system components are made in Georgia, while in the past almost everything had been imported. Still Dr. Chkhaidze seeks partners for innovation and was to be in the United States this fall for development talks.

As a kind of precursor to the forthcoming massive petroleum movement between the boundaries of Georgia, which will come with the completion of a new pipeline due to go into operation in 2005, the railroad moves oil products from Azerbaijan to the Black Sea in massive amounts. A visitor sees rolling waves of tanker cars on the rail lines bearing the names Chevron, AZPETROL and others, the output of Azerbaijanian Caspian sea oil deposits. By the time the pipeline takes over some of this liquid traffic Georgian Railways will be looking beyond to carriage of other products to many European and American destinations. Under construction now are seaship-railroad links to allow direct movement of rail cars onto sea vessels.

In addition to seeking American partners for advanced system component development, Dr. Chkhaidze is partnering with railroad systems in Spain, Italy and England on various projects. Having earned a Ph.D, with a dissertation on the interface of railways and seaports, being a member of the Tbilisi University Engineering faculty and possessing more than a quarter-century of practical experience in the Soviet and Georgian railway systems, Georgia’s top railway man is poised to move the system to even greater achievement in the coming years.