Bangladesh Rail Plans Chattogram Port Network to Chase $100bn Goal

Bangladesh Railway has launched a 93.5 crore taka (roughly $7.6 million) World Bank-financed planning project to hook all five terminals at Chattogram Port into one integrated rail network, with completion slated for March 2027. The move targets a bottleneck at the gateway that handles more than 90 percent of the country's export-import and containerised cargo — and a national ambition of $100 billion in exports by 2030 that current volumes don't support.

The country shipped $48 billion in the 2025-26 fiscal year, which ended in June, down 0.6 percent year on year, according to figures cited in the source reporting. Ready-made garments, the dominant export sector, fell 1.6 percent to $38.7 billion. September brought some relief: exports rose 8.5 percent to $3.9 billion, with RMG shipments up 8.6 percent to $3.1 billion. Still, the gap to $100 billion is wide — the country needs to more than double its outbound trade in under five years.

What will the project actually build?

Nothing yet — and that's the point. An executive committee of the National Economic Council approved the preparatory project, which funds studies and designs rather than construction, as reported by state news agency Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha. Any buildout will come through separate investment projects down the line.

The studies cover the Dhaka-Chattogram freight corridor starting at Faujdarhat, the junction where trains leave the main line for the port, running through the port's rail yard. Terminals in scope include:

• the general cargo berth
• three operating container terminals: Chittagong, Patenga and New Mooring
• the Laldia and Bay terminals, both still in development

Project officials say the port lacks adequate rail links to all five terminals, including those under construction. Bangladesh's 2025 national logistics policy directs rail connections to every seaport, land port, economic zone and inland container depot, with a target of lifting rail's freight share to 20 percent.

How bad is the rail deficit now?

Rail's share of import-export container traffic has slipped below 4 percent, down from nearly 10 percent, with freight operations needing 16 locomotives daily against three to five actually available, according to Bangladeshi business publication Bonik Barta. The sole inland container depot serving Dhaka's garment belt by rail, Kamalapur, handles around 50,000 TEUs per year.

Its replacement tells a longer story. The Dhirashram depot, first proposed in 2007, is designed for 432,000 TEUs annually — more than eight times Kamalapur's volume — and would free the Kamalapur site for a multimodal transport hub. Nearly two decades later, a 10-year feasibility study, withdrawn private partners and a government fight over the site have left it unbuilt.

Inside the port, the existing track is metre-gauge, narrower than the broad gauge the railway plans for future freight, and the two main container terminals have only limited rail access, railway officials said. A fix is underway on the approach: Bangladesh Railway is converting the 131.2-kilometre Laksam-Chattogram line to dual gauge under a 16,955 crore taka (roughly $1.4 billion) project running to June 2032, per a railway ministry proposal reported by The Business Standard.

Why the urgency for apparel sourcing?

Chattogram ranks 364th out of 400 ports in the World Bank's 2025 Container Port Performance Index, with repeated labour, weather and structural disruptions. The competitive context sharpens the picture: in Vietnam, Maersk's APM Terminals and Hateco have agreed to study a northern rail network anchored at Hai Phong, tying industrial parks to ports.

At a Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry roundtable in May, M Masrur Reaz, chairman of Policy Exchange Bangladesh, cited World Bank data showing that cutting one day of port dwell time could lift exports by 7.4 percent. A 25 percent cut in logistics costs, the data indicated, could boost exports by 20 percent.

The Prime Minister's Office has now formed five working groups — covering trade facilitation, logistics digitalisation, investment, skills and multimodal infrastructure — to implement the 2025 policy, which aims to make Bangladesh a regional trade and logistics hub by 2050.

For sourcing executives, the decision this forces is straightforward: until rail capacity and port performance measurably improve, Bangladesh costings must keep pricing in road-corridor congestion and dwell-time risk on Chattogram-bound freight.