before Khasan). It began operating in February 2000, and saw only a minor amount of traffic (678 railcars of lumber) over the next two years. The line was closed in 2002–03, briefly reopened in 2003, and closed again in September 2004. On 15 February 2011, the two companies who own the line, Northeast Asia Railway Group, a Chinese company, and JSC Golden Link, a Russian company, signed an agreement to resume operations on the line in May 2011. In November 2008, the transport ministries of Russia and the China signed an agreement about creating one more link between the railway systems of the two countries. It will involve a railway bridge between across the Amur (Heilong) River, connecting Tongjiang in China's Heilongjiang province with Nizhneleninskoye in Russia's Jewish Autonomous Oblast. On 4 November 2010, the project director, Wang Jin, told Xinhua News Agency that construction on the bridge would begin in January 2011. Russia to China via Mongolia The Trans-Mongolian line, connecting Ulan-Ude on the Trans-Siberian with China's Erenhot via the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, both serves as a crucial link to the outside world for landlocked Mongolia, and the shortest connection between the Trans-Siberian Railway and Beijing. This line's capacity, however, is limited by its being single-track. Kazakhstan to China While the USSR had long been connected with China via the rail links in Northeastern China and Mongolia, since the 1950s plans existed to connect the two countries' rail networks at the Kazakhstan/Xinjiang border. The Soviets completed their line from Aktogay (a station on the Turksib in eastern Kazakhstan) to their border station Druzhba (now Dostyk), but the construction on the Chinese side stopped because of the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s. In 1985 construction commenced on the Northern Xinjiang Railway to link the Chinese and Russian rail networks via Kazakhstan. The section between Ürümqi and Alashankou was completed on 16 September 1990, linking the railway lines of the two countries at Dostyk. In July 1991 the first goods train traveled along the line from China to Kazakhstan's then-capital of Almaty. In December 2009, a second rail link from China was built to the Kazakhstan border at Khorgos. The Jinghe–Yining–Khorgos Railway forks off of the Northern Xinjiang Railway at Jinghe and approaches Kazakhstan from the Ili River Valley. A rail link on Kazakh side will extend the line to Saryozek by 2013. The rail link through the Korgas Pass was