Proper railway benchmarking requires a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) based on data that are much more advanced than what is currently available in Central Asian countries. Given the capital-intensive nature of this industry, with high fixed maintenance and depreciation of costs, efficient asset utilisation is indeed essential. As depicted in Figure 35, Central Asian countries have an average track utilisation level (here measured by the ratio between train-km and the length of the network) comparable to other sparsely populated countries such as Australia. In Kazakhstan it is even relatively high.