October 20, 2014
About four-and-a-half months after it was launched, a rail-based public transportation system in Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar officially expanded operations beyond that city’s limits. This extension of the Ulaanbaatar Railbus consists of a suburban line that provides express service between Ulaanbaatar and the city of Darkhan, with an intermediate stop in the city of Züünkharaa. (Railbuses are essentially lightweight railcars that resemble standard buses and are used on a regular basis for transporting passengers.)
The original segment of the Ulaanbaatar Railbus that had made its public debut on June 4 of that year was a city line encompassing a total of eight stations. One of these stations is the Ulaanbaatar railway station, which also forms part of the system’s suburban line. The Ulaanbaatar Railbus was built upon infrastructure first put into place for the Trans-Mongolian Railway. The leading advocates for using that portion of infrastructure for the construction of the Ulaanbaatar Railbus included Erdeniin Bat-Üül, the mayor of Ulaanbaatar between 2012 and 2016; and Amarjargal Gansuckh, Mongolia’s minister of roads and transportation from 2012 to 2014.
(The accompanying photo of the Ulaanbaatar railway station was taken in 2024.)
Photo Credit: Chongkian (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)
For more information on the Ulaanbaatar Railbus, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulaanbaatar_Railbus
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