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.