High-speed rail line to Beijing is 91% completed

The Ministry of Railways said yesterday that the world's longest high-speed rail line, connecting Shanghai and Beijing, was nearing completion.

Ministry spokesman Wang Yongping said 91 percent of the track, or 1,203 kilometers, had been completed.

Major tasks yet to be completed include building bridges over the Huaihe and Yangtze rivers and putting up the main terminal in Shanghai, he said. More than 110,000 workers are working on the project.

When the line is completed, trains will reach Beijing in five hours. Currently the travel time is at least 11 hours.

The ministry has said it plans to have 120,000km of rail lines in service by 2020, of which 16,000km would be dedicated passenger lines.

By the end of this year, China will have more than 79,000km of rail lines. To meet the 2020 target will require investment of about 5 trillion yuan (US$727 billion), the ministry said.

China plans to invest more than 150 billion yuan to build more railways in the coal-rich northern province of Shanxi as part of a bid to ease chronic congestion and promote domestic growth.

Expanding the rail system will also help alleviate severe bottlenecks, especially for transporting the coal that is used to generate three quarters of China's electricity.

Shanxi, which accounts for a third of China's coal output, will get 2,000km of new track by 2015, said Yang Zhongmin, head of the ministry's department of development and planning.

Construction of at least three new railway lines will start in the first half of next year. Minister of Railways Liu Zhijun pledged the ministry's support for the projects.

The building of a railway in the central-southern part of Shanxi will enable the province to ship coal directly to coastal ports in eastern China's Shandong Province.

Meanwhile, the Lanzhou-Qinghai railway, a trunk line in northwest China, will see its capacity improved in next month when an auxiliary line starts operation, according to the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Corp.

The 177.8km Lanzhou-Qinghai railway, which links Lanzhou, capital of Gansu Province, with its counterpart Xining in Qinghai Province, was built 50 years ago.

The construction of the auxiliary line began in 2006 and cost 4 billion yuan

(2008-12-8 source:Xinhua)