The Middle Corridor's biggest weakness is no longer track or berths but borders, paperwork and the handoffs between operators, according to the World Bank. Its report "Integration: World-Class Trade Logistics Along the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor", released on 28 September, was presented in Astana on 15 October at the New Silk Way international business forum. The Bank estimates that a container moving from Chongqing to Budapest via the corridor takes 47 to 50 days door to door, against roughly 45 days by sea. With infrastructure investment and trade-facilitation reforms in place, the fastest route could come down to 18 to 19 days by 2040.
The forum was part of Kazakhstan's Transport Week. Andrei Mikhnev, the World Bank's director for Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, spoke on the Middle Corridor panel alongside Nurzhan Kelbuganov, who chairs the railway and water transport committee at Kazakhstan's Ministry of Transport.
The report covers nine countries with close to 200 million people: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Türkiye, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Armenia is not yet on the route, but direct links are expected in the 2030s, and because the analysis runs from 2023 to 2040 it is included.
The bill: $25bn of hardware, $30bn of the rest
Corridor countries will need to invest at least $25bn in physical infrastructure through 2040, mostly in rail lines, seaports and feeder roads. The Bank puts a further $30bn on "enabling" investments: road and rail links that tie the corridor into local economies, logistics hubs and inland terminals, rolling stock, cargo-handling equipment and digital systems. A significant part of that, it says, could come from private investors.
The modelled payoff by 2040: trade volumes on the route more than triple, travel times halve, combined GDP rises 3.3%, about $58bn at current prices, and employment grows 2.9%, or roughly 2 million jobs. Pair the investment with reforms that make trade and transport more efficient, and volumes could quadruple while travel times fall by two-thirds from 2023 levels. Türkiye and Kazakhstan would see the largest gains in absolute terms; small landlocked economies such as the Kyrgyz Republic and Armenia would gain most in relative terms.
On freight, total corridor volumes could grow from 8.8 million tonnes in 2023 to about 32 million tonnes by 2040, while non-oil cargo could rise roughly 4.5-fold to nearly 16 million tonnes.
Most bottlenecks are already being built out
The Bank identified 16 critical infrastructure bottlenecks. Projects addressing 75% of them are under way and the rest are in government plans. Its conclusion is that operations, not physical capacity, are the main challenge ahead.
Documents show why. A container travelling from China to Europe on the corridor goes through customs transit several times and switches between several rail consignment notes and ocean bills of lading, ending up with well over ten documents that largely repeat each other. The Bank proposes merging them into a single digital Transport, Transit and Trade (T3) document or data record.
Rules related to this news
The report sets four priorities: a single digital corridor system with one entry point for transport, transit and trade data; an integrated, market-oriented joint-venture operator for containerised rail and trans-Caspian shipping; stronger corridor-wide coordination to track performance and clear bottlenecks together; and more commercial state-owned rail, port and shipping companies through better governance, finances and regulation. For cross-border cooperation it proposes TARS, an assessment and response structure built on shared performance data, a public-private advisory committee and an intergovernmental decision-making platform.
The Kazakh stretch
According to the Ministry of Transport, Kelbuganov told the forum that cargo on the route has grown more than fivefold over the past five years. In January to August 2026 containerised transit on the route reached about 44,200 TEU, up 58% year on year, including 419 container trains from China, an 84% increase in train numbers.
Kazakhstan is building new rail lines and upgrading existing ones and expanding terminal capacity at the ports of Aktau and Kuryk. The Aktau container hub is in operation and dredging is under way. The panel also discussed electronic document flow and linking the information systems of national railways.
What it means for shippers from China
On the Bank's own numbers, the corridor is still slower than the sea for China-Europe containers. Whether it wins that cargo depends on merging documents, running the Caspian leg to schedule and sharing data across borders, all of which need several governments to move together rather than one country laying more track.
In our view, the things to watch are who leads a T3 and single-window pilot and when, whether the joint rail-shipping operator materialises, and how many scheduled services the new capacity at Aktau and Kuryk actually supports. For companies building warehouses, terminals or multimodal services in Kazakhstan, the $30bn list of enabling investments also shows which parts of the chain governments are prepared to open to private capital.
(The cover image is an AI-generated illustration, not a photograph, and does not directly depict the news.)
Sources:
World Bank, press release, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2026/09/28/trans-caspian-transport-corridor-investments-spur-growth-and-create-millions-jobs
World Bank, report page, https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/eca/publication/world-class-trade-logistics-along-trans-caspian-transport-corridor
The Astana Times, https://astanatimes.com/2026/10/middle-corridor-could-add-58-billion-to-regional-gdp-by-2040-world-bank-says/
Ministry of Transport of Kazakhstan (memleket.kz), https://memleket.kz/ru/news/120690-na-forume-new-silk-way-rassmotreli-perspektivy-razvitiia-srednego-koridora
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