By Ian Werther in News — 13 Mar 2026

Beijing-Pyongyang rail service resumes after more than six years of border closures

A North Korea–China cross-border passenger train service has resumed after more than six years, with the Pyongyang-to-Beijing leg arriving at Beijing Station on the morning of the 13th after departing Pyongyang on the 12th at 10:26 a.m.

In the opposite direction, a Beijing-to-Pyongyang service left Beijing yesterday at 5:26 p.m. and is scheduled to pass through Tianjin, Shenyang, Dandong and Sinuiju before arriving in Pyongyang at 6:07 p.m. today. The reopening follows the pause in service that began in early 2020, when North Korea sealed its borders to curb the spread of COVID-19.

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.

China State Railway Group says the Pyongyang–Beijing line will operate four times a week in both directions—Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The route connects major rail hubs in northeastern China with North Korea’s capital.

The restart marks the first time since the border closures that regular passenger trains have linked North Korea and China, signaling renewed cross-border connectivity after a prolonged disruption tied to the pandemic. The service is limited to passenger travel under current arrangements, with the broader scope for freight or tourism not detailed in the reporting.

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.

Geographically, the Beijing–Pyongyang path runs through Tianjin and Shenyang in China and crosses into North Korea via Dandong, a Chinese border city, and Sinuiju, North Korea’s border town opposite Dandong. Pyongyang remains the endpoint in North Korea.

For observers outside Korea, the return of this rail link matters beyond bilateral travel. It affects regional logistics and potential shifts in trade flow, monitoring of cross-border movement, and how North Korea’s relations with China influence broader regional diplomacy, sanctions enforcement, and supply-chain resilience in Northeast Asia. U.S. policymakers may watch the development as a gauge of China–North Korea alignment and its implications for regional stability and economic connectivity.

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