China and Kazakhstan will jointly build a high-speed railway connecting Astana and Almaty.
Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who arrived in Beijing on Monday afternoon for a three-day state visit, said his country would like to further cooperate with China in more projects in the high-tech and in the railway and road-building sectors.
Trend reports that the project will be completed in 2015. Trains on the 1,050-kilometer-long double-track line will run at a maximum speed of 350 kph, and the railway is expected to carry 5 million passengers annually.
Experts in China estimate that 65% of the line will run along the ground, with the remaining 370 km to be made up of bridges and elevated railways.
Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world and its territory is greater than Western Europe. Its neighbors to the north are Russia and China. The capital was moved in 1997 from Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, to Astana.