The Turkish State Railways started building high-speed rail lines in 2003. The first line, which has a length of 533 km from Istanbul (Turkey's largest metropolis) via Eskişehir to Ankara (the capital) is under construction and will reduce the travelling time from 6–7 hours to 3 hours 10 minutes. The first phase of this project, the Ankara-Eskişehir line which has a length of 245 km and some 1h 05m of projected travel time, will enter service in 2007, the trials of which began on April 23, 2007. The rest of the project, the Eskişehir - İstanbul line, is scheduled to be completed by 2009, including the Marmaray (Bosphorus undersea railway tunnel) project which will establish a railway connection between Europe and Asia (the Middle East) for the very first time.
The construction of the Ankara-Konya line (300km) began in 2006. A travel time of 70 minutes is projected for this track, which will also be connected with the Ankara-Eskişehir line in Polatlı.
Other projected high speed rail lines include:
- Ankara - Afyon - Uşak - İzmir
- Ankara - Yozgat - Sivas
- İstanbul - Bursa (branching from the İstanbul-Ankara line)
- Ankara - Bursa (branching from the İstanbul-Ankara line)
- İstanbul - Kapıkule (Bulgarian border)
The commercial high speed trains are expected to reach top speeds of 250-300 km/h (150-200 mph) on these tracks.
The first ten high speed train sets were purchased from CAF of Spain, and have a maximum speed of 250 km/h. In addition, two ETR 500 train sets, which can reach a top speed of 300 km/h, have been rented from Italy and were used for testing the first completed part of the high speed railway network, between Eskişehir and Ankara, on April 23, 2007.[1]
For further sets to be used in new planned tracks and the current ones under construction, a joint enterprise (EUROTEM) between the South Korean ROTEM and Turkish TÜVASAŞ has been established, and a factory in Adapazarı, Sakarya Province is being constructed to licence build the HSR-350X trains which can reach a maximum speed of 352.4 km/h.