A South Korean train on Friday departed for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to conduct an 18-day joint inspection on the DPRK's railways.
The six-car train left the Dorasan Station, just south of the inter-Korean border, at about 9:05 a.m. local time (0005 GMT) for the Panmun Station near the DPRK's border town of Kaesong, local TV footage showed.
A DPRK locomotive would take over the train, which carries 28 South Korean experts and government officials from the unification and transport ministries, from the Panmun Station.
The train would inspect a 1,200-km rail track along western and eastern DPRK. The western railway ranges from Kaesong to Sinuiju, while the eastern rail line spans from Mount Kumgang, the DPRK's scenic resort in the southeast coast, to the DPRK's northeastern tip of Tumen River.
The joint survey on the eastern DPRK railway would mark the first of its kind since the Korean Peninsula was divided with the armistice agreement that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.
The two Koreas jointly inspected the western rail line from Kaesong to Sinuiju in 2007, and had run car train services from the Dorasan Station to the Panmun Station for about a year, before the services were halted amid the frayed inter-Korean relations.
The joint railway inspection came as part of efforts to implement the Panmunjom Declaration, which South Korean President Moon Jae-in and top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un inked after their first summit in April at the border village of Panmunjom.
The two leaders agreed to modernize and eventually connect railways across the inter-Korean border.
