South Korean Team Returns After Inspecting North Korea’s Western Rail Line

GIKorea | December 6, 2018 | Inter-Korean Issues | 3 Comments

The first part of the survey of North Korea’s railways has been completed:

This photo provided by the Joint Press Corps shows a group of South Korean officials and railway experts speaking to reporters after returning home on Dec. 5, 2018, following a six-day railway inspection in North Korea. (Yonhap)

A group of South Korean officials and railway experts returned home Wednesday after completing a joint inspection of the rail system in western North Korea.

The 28 South Koreans crossed into Dorasan Station, just south of the inter-Korean border, at around 5:11 p.m. following a six-day inspection that covered the rail line from Kaesong near the border with the South to Sinuiju near the border with China.

A train carrying six South Korean cars left for the North on Friday. It was taken over by a North Korean locomotive at Panmun Station, from which point five North Korean cars were connected to it for the joint work.

“The overall railway conditions have not been better or much worse compared with when we visited there before,” Lim Jong-il, a transportation ministry official who headed the team, told reporters. He was involved in a 2007 railway inspection in the North. [Yonhap]

It looks like the child slave labor has been doing a good job keeping the tracks in North Korea from degrading since 2007.