By Ian Werther in News — 13 Mar 2026

China and North Korea reopen Dandong-Pyongyang passenger train after six-year pause

A passenger train linking Dandong in China with Pyongyang in North Korea crossed the Amnok River bridge that connects the two countries on the morning of the 12th, marking the resumption of international passenger service after a six-year pause. The eight-car train consisted of one blue locomotive, one white freight car, and six dark-green passenger cars, and carried signage in both Chinese and Korean reading “Dandong-Pyongyang,” according to the Nikkei.

The train is scheduled to arrive in Pyongyang on the 13th, the report said. The service had been suspended since North Korea closed its borders in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, limiting foreign arrivals.

For five years, Jeremy Harbeck has worked as a support scientist for NASA’s Operation IceBridge, an airborne mission to study polar ice. The data processing that he does typically takes place in an office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. However, to speed the process of delivering data to the Arctic sea ice forecasting community, Harbeck traveled to Greenland for the first time in spring 2015.
He had just arrived at Greenland’s Thule Air Base on March 20 when a mechanical issue grounded the aircraft. No science flight could happen for a few days. As teams in the United States and Greenland scrambled to locate and deliver a replacement part, researchers on the ground waited. Some of them hiked to what was locally known as “the iceberg.”
The unnamed berg pictured above has been frozen in place by sea ice in North Star Bay. Harbeck shot the photograph—a composite of four 49-second images—on March 21 at about 2:30 a.m. local time. The sun never fully sets at this time of year in the Arctic, so sunlight appears on the left side of the image. Lights from Thule are visible on the right side. Look for the Milky Way (top left) and a few very faint meteors visible in the early morning sky.
Harbeck left the dock at Thule with sea ice scientist (and current IceBridge project scientist) Nathan Kurtz and a local recreation officer at about 10 p.m. From there, the group hiked 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) across the still-thick sea ice in weather that Harbeck called a “pleasant” minus 18 degrees Celsius (0 degrees Fahrenheit). They paused frequently on the way, and they even circled the berg to check for polar bears.

“You don’t have a sense of scale of this berg until you get up to it,” Harbeck said. “It’s about the size of my apartment building, and that’s only the part protruding from the water.” Assuming the berg is ungrounded (which is uncertain), about one-tenth of its mass is above water. — Representative image for context; not directly related to the specific event in this article. License: Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

China’s state rail authority, the China Railway Group, announced that international passenger trains between Dandong and Pyongyang would operate in both directions from the 12th, and that travelers possessing passports valid for outbound travel could use the service. The line runs four times a week: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Dandong, a major border city in China's Liaoning Province, sits opposite North Korea’s Sinuiju across the Amnok (Yalu) River. The bridge over the river is known as the China-North Korea Friendship Bridge, one of the few rail links between the two countries and a focal point for cross-border travel.

Kate Carter, on her 90th birthday, poses for photographer Carol M. Highsmith in the log cabins in North Carolina, United States, where Highsmith's great-grandfather and grandfather, Pleasant Jiles Carter (1847-1931) and Yancey Ligon Carter (1873-1947), were born and lived in Wentworth, North Carolina. — Representative image for context; not directly related to the specific event in this article. License: Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

For U.S. readers, the reopening matters because it signals a renewed, if cautious, channel for people-to-people exchange and limited travel between China and North Korea. The development could influence regional dynamics, trade and supply-chain considerations tied to North Korea, and broader diplomatic signaling in Northeast Asia.

North Korea’s border controls have historically been tightly managed, and cross-border traffic remains subject to political and security considerations. Still, the restart of passenger service with China underscores how closely Pyongyang’s ties with Beijing continue to shape regional flows of people, goods and information.

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