Georgian Railways has put $350 million on the table for 45 locomotives — 71 of its current 91 are over 35 years old

Reported on 8 September 2026, Georgian Railways has opened a $350 million procurement for 45 electric freight locomotives. It forms part of TC-GATE, a corridor programme with a total value put at more than $750 million. A separate strand covers ten electric multiple-unit passenger trains to be bought under Asian Development Bank rules, with no price disclosed. The financing behind the wider programme was approved in June 2026: $372 million from the World Bank and $181 million from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Of the 91 locomotives Georgian Railways currently operates, 71 are more than 35 years old. Freight through the country reached 6.9 million tonnes in the first half of 2026, a 10% rise on the year before. Growing volumes on ageing traction is the classic point at which a railway starts losing reliability before it loses capacity — trains run, but schedules stop being promises. Replacing the fleet is less glamorous than a new line and usually matters more to the businesses that depend on it.

No delivery schedule was published for the passenger units and no binding commissioning dates were given for the 45 freight locomotives. A tender is the start of a procurement, not the arrival of equipment, and rolling stock orders of this size are typically measured in years between award and service. Anyone planning around faster or more reliable rail — a logistics business, a developer weighing a site near a station, a tour operator hoping for better regional services — should treat the funding approval as the solid fact and the timetable as still unwritten.

Georgia's case for itself as a transit country rests on being the land route between the Caspian and the Black Sea, and that case is only as strong as the equipment carrying the cargo. The government has framed the current spending as the first investment of this scale in the railway since independence. Whether that translates into steadier freight revenue and better passenger services is a question for the next few years rather than this one — but the direction of the money is now documented, and the loans are signed.