The first regular service for half a century across the heavily fortified frontier began on December 11, with trains carrying goods and raw materials to and from a Seoul-funded industrial estate at Kaesong just north of the border.

But the service, which operates five days a week, has been carrying little cargo because factory owners find it more convenient to use truck traffic.

At military talks Friday the North Koreans proposed reducing the frequency, according to the unidentified South Korean official quoted by Yonhap news agency.

'It is better to reduce the runs than keep the service going without cargo,' Colonel Pak Rim Su, head of the North's delegation, was quoted as saying.

The South rejected the proposal but offered to bring it up at a separate inter-Korean panel on railway cooperation, the official said.

Officials from both sides had hailed the start of the train service as a landmark in reconciliation moves between two countries which remain technically at war following their 1950-1953 conflict.

But on some days last month the train was running empty, according to South Korean state railway officials at the time.

They said it would be continued because of its symbolic significance.

The one-day working-level military talks on Friday at the border truce village of Panmunjom were the first dialogue between the two countries this year.

They focused on security issues regarding the train and ways to guarantee freer access for South Korean businesses and investors to the industrial complex, but ended without agreement.

Some 20,000 North Koreans produce clothes, utensils, watches and other labour-intensive goods for South Korean firms in Kaesong, earning around 60 dollars a month.

North Korea's powerful military is uneasy about opening greater access to the estate near the sensitive border region, according to analysts. -- AFP