It turns out there’s a bottleneck right through the heart of one of the world’s most active cities, and until recently, it was hard to see any solutions besides patience. All freight trains moving across the European/Asian border of Türkiye are presently forced through the Bosphorus’s Marmaray tunnel, a facility designed predominantly for metro transit service by commuters and only able to handle about three million tonnes of cargo annually. For a nation whose Twelfth Development Plan has as its explicit goal the role of Türkiye as connector between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, sitting as it does on the Western end of the Middle Corridor’s rising trade route, three million tonnes is just an estimate. On Tuesday, the Asian Development Bank sanctioned a loan of €645.83 million as the next piece in an arrangement expected to be one of the largest multilateral infrastructure investments worldwide this decade.

Istanbul North Rail Crossing (also known as the INRAIL project) is a 127-km-long greenfield railway that will run without passing through the Istanbul metro area. Specifically, INRAIL will connect Gebze on one side of the Bosphorus to Halkalı on another side of the water passage via a newly constructed railroad bridge, namely the Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge. It is planned that roughly half of the distance (61 km, in 44 tunnels) will be underground, constructed by using a twin-tube tunneling machine, NATM and cut & cover techniques. The total cost of the project amounts to $8.27 billion, funded by $6.75 billion loaned from six international financial institutions: the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Islamic Development Bank, and the OPEC Fund for International Development.

World Bank has disbursed anchor financing of $2 billion on March 31, 2026, which has been the largest individual tranche, while other funding agencies have made up for the rest of $6.75 billion funding for the project. Asian Development Bank has also........

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