Asian rail transportation system on right track within a decade
Asian rail transportation system on right track within a decade
Anthony Paul, The Straits Times, Asia News Network, Singapore
Slowly but surely, a revolution in transcontinental rail
transportation is changing the face of the Asia-Pacific region.
The revolution's battle plans extend as far west as London, as
far south as Australia. Singapore will be among the biggest
beneficiaries.
First, an update on what will become in about a decade
Singapore's first taste of the revolution's dividends -- the much
awaited Singapore-Kunming Railway Link.
At a meeting with United Nations experts in Manila last week,
the Asian Development Bank indicated that it was prepared to help
with the financing needed to link the Thai and Cambodian rail
systems via Aranyaprathet. This amount would reconstruct 55
kilometers of the Aranyaprathet-Sisophon track. "Completion
should make a Singapore-Phnom Penh journey possible about four
years from now," Barry Cable, a Bangkok-based UN rail transport
expert, told me.
The one remaining link between Singapore and Kunming in Yunnan
province would then be the 403 kilometers between Bat Deng, near
Phnom Penh, and Ho Chi Minh City via Loc Ninh on the Vietnam
border.
Completion of the Thailand-Cambodia link and resulting
benefits should generate momentum for the drive to fill the Phnom
Penh-Ho Chi Minh City gap. Preliminary talks among UN officials,
the ADB and regional governments have already addressed co-
financing requirements for this final Singapore-Kunming section,
which would have to be built from scratch.
About 10 years from now, it should be possible to embark on
what would surely be the world's greatest rail adventure -- from
Singapore across the entire Eurasian land mass.
If you wanted to confine your travels to the region, you'd
travel via Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam for the 5,513
kilometers to Kunming. By then, spurs from Kunming into Myanmar
and Laos may also have been built.
But no need to remain in the region. A Singapore-London ticket
should be possible. Change to a Beijing train at Dong Dang on the
China-Vietnam border. Then board the Trans-Siberian Railway in
Beijing for the crossing to Moscow, followed by a Eurail journey
through the Channel Tunnel to Victoria Station.
A century ago, East Asia had many unresolved doubts about
railways. Complaining that train tracks sliced through buried
ancestors, China's antiforeign Boxer rebels were burning down
railroad stations. No such scene greets this new century. From
Seoul to Singapore and Sydney, Taipei to Tibet, new rail networks
abound.
China tops the list. In January, the world's first commercial
magnetically levitated, ultra high-speed train began operating in
Shanghai. Other notable Chinese railway projects over the next
few years will include a high-speed Beijing-Shanghai link -- to
be built for Shanghai's 2010 World Expo -- and the opening of the
first "Roof-of-the-World" railway (from Xining in Qinghai
province, to Lhasa, Tibet's capital).
Japan, France and Germany are contenders to build the $15
billion Beijing-Shanghai service, which will cut travel time for
the 1,400 kilometers between China's two major cities from 12
hours to five. Construction of the 1,956-kilometer Qinghai-Tibet
railway, a stupendous confrontation with terrain and altitude,
began in 2001; completion is expected in 2007.
China's other railway plans stagger the imagination (and
possibly future budgets): Mass-transit rail in 15 major cities; a
2,196-kilometer railroad across six east coast provinces; and a
3,100-kilometer rail link -- agreed to by Kazakhstan last month
-- that will follow the ancient Silk Route linking China to
Europe.
Meanwhile, a new railway is reminding Australians that Darwin,
their northernmost city, is as much Singapore's neighbor as it is
Sydney's. (Sydney is only 103 kilometers closer.) Australia's
last great rail link -- a 1,420-kilometer span built between
Alice Springs and Darwin -- carried the first train in February
on the first north-south continental rail crossing, Adelaide-
Darwin. As part of the new rail-freight service, a 6,025-ton,
twin-deck container vessel, Northern Territory Express, now links
Darwin to Singapore in a seven-day voyage via Timor Leste.
The main reason for this region-wide transportation upsurge?
Growth -- in both population and private affluence. Asians are
fast becoming the world's most prolific exporters, and they now
have the time and money for vacations away from home: China's
domestic tourism authorities report double-digit growth for the
past 16 years. Some 90 percent of Chinese (that's 1.17 billion
travelers) now take at least one in-country trip yearly.
China sources also report another, more ominous reason for the
leadership's focus on labor-intensive construction. Cheaper and
better agricultural products that are expected to flood into
China from abroad, now that the country has entered the World
Trade Organization, may cut the need for domestic farm
production. As a Shanghai-based Australian diplomat told me:
"Railroad construction would be one good way to keep young men
busy -- and outside most cities."
Rail continues to make headlines elsewhere. At the beginning
of the month, Seoul launched its first high-speed train service,
the Korea Train Express, joining Seoul and Busan, the second city
-- 410 kilometers in two-and-a-half hours. And in Taiwan from
October of next year, a high-speed, trans-island railway will
link Taipei with Kaohsiung in one-and-a-half hours.
But no country's rail building is likely to compare with
mainland China's. Since 1902, war and civil tumult have retarded
Chinese rail development. During Mao Zedong's disastrous 1958-
1960 Great Leap Forward, communes tore up rails and melted them
in backyard furnaces in a desperate effort to meet steel-
production quotas.
A simple statistic dramatizes the disordered century's result:
There are 113 centimeters of track today for each American, whose
country is roughly the same size as China. There are just 5.5
centimeters for each Chinese.
Well into this century and possibly the next, building those
missing 107.5 centimeters should add up to a lot of business.