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Construction work on China-Laos railway to start next month
Construction on a 421-kilometre railway linking China through Laos to the rest of mainland South-East Asia is to begin next month, state media reports said Wednesday.
Lao Minister of Industry and Commerce Nam Viyaket said the high-speed track was scheduled to be finished within four years at an estimated cost of 7 billion dollars, state-run KPL newspaper said.
Chinese contractors will build the railway, with Laos providing the land for the project, to link China's Yunnan province to the Lao capital Vientiane.
A similar high-speed railway is planned between Nong Khai, the Thai city situated across the Mekong River from Vientiane, to Bangkok, to be built as a joint Chinese-Thai venture.
Although the Chinese-Thai railway project has been approved by the Thai cabinet, it has yet to be finalized. Royal Thai Railways already operates a rail link between Nong Khai and Bangkok, and is expected to oppose the new track.
Nam warned that efforts to construct a China-ASEAN Railway were running up against opposition from some member countries of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
He said the China-Laos railway was designed to accommodate high-speed trains travelling at 200 kilometres per hour for passenger trains and 120 kilometres per hour for cargo.
Such speeds require a track width of 1.435 metres, the standard gauge in China and Europe. All existing South-East Asian railways are 1-metre gauge.
Landlocked Laos is the only South-East Asian country other than tiny Brunei that has no national railway network.
'ASEAN economic integration by 2015 may face difficulty if the China-ASEAN railway is not fully supported by all ASEAN members,' Nam told the newspaper.
ASEAN has set 2015 as its deadline for full economic and social integration as a bloc.
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