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South and North Korean railway experts conduct a joint inspection of a track near Kamho Station

After the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea decided on Nov. 23 not to apply sanctions to an inter-Korean joint railway survey aimed at modernizing North Korean railroads, South and North Korea are expected to launch their survey as early as this week.

On Nov. 25, officials from South Korea’s Ministry of Unification said that the two sides might be initiating the joint railway survey as soon as this week after discussing the specifics of the schedule and method.

During a plenary session of the National Assembly’s Special Committee for Inter-Korean Economic Cooperation on Nov. 23, Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon said, “The joint railway survey will be carried out before long. It might be as early as this month.”

Connecting and modernizing South and North Korea’s road and railway networks is a project that the leaders of South and North Korea agreed to carry out in their Panmunjom Declaration on Apr. 27. The two sides had planned to put together a joint team to survey conditions on the North Korean stretch of the Gyeongui Line (from Kaesong to Sinuiju) starting on July 24 and then to move on to the East Sea Line (from Mt. Kumgang to the Tumen River).

But these plans ran afoul of sanctions on North Korea and have been on hold for more than four months. An effort to assess the condition of North Korean railroads also fell through when the UN Command refused to authorize the project this past August. At the time, the South Korean government had maintained that the joint survey was not subject to sanctions against North Korea, but following deliberations with the US, it found a way to enable the survey to move forward by persuading the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea to grant an exemption from the sanctions.

Given the transit time required to assess all sections of the Gyeongui and East Sea lines, the joint railroad survey is expected to take over 20 days altogether. South and North Korea will first be completing the survey of the Gyeongui Line before continuing to the East Sea Line. After a South Korean locomotive pulls six cars (providing accommodations, meals, meetings and power generation) across the military demarcation line (MDL) into North Korean territory, a North Korean locomotive will pull the South Korean train as well as North Korean cars carrying necessary materials for the duration of the survey. Between nine and ten train cars will be involved in the survey.

The groundbreaking ceremony for connecting roads and railways on the West and East Seas that South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un agreed to hold by the end of the year in their Pyongyang Joint Declaration is expected to take place in mid- or late-December, shortly after the joint railroad survey wraps up. But this groundbreaking doesn’t mean that South and North Korea will immediately begin construction. The groundbreaking in December is expected to be a symbolic event that would not require a sanctions exemption.

The specific schedule for the actual construction is likely to be determined by North Korea’s progress on denuclearization and by the results of the North Korea-US summit that’s projected to be held at the beginning of next year. The South Korean government’s position is that since the project to connect and modernize roads and railways requires the cooperation and support of the US and the international community, including an exemption from UN sanctions on North Korea, the project will have to wait for concrete progress on North Korea’s denuclearization.

In related news, South and North Korea completed their joint survey of roads on the Gyeongui corridor (from Kaesong to Pyongyang) in August. A joint road research and survey team held its second meeting at the Inter-Korean Joint Liaison Office in Kaesong on Nov. 12 to arrange a survey of roads along the East Sea (from Goseong to Wonsan), but the team has not yet managed to finalize the schedule. The North Koreans want their roads be repaved because of their current poor conditions, but the South Koreans are proceeding cautiously because new road construction would require an exemption from sanctions on the North.

By Noh Ji-won, staff reporter

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