[photopress:_Lanzhou.jpg,full,alignright]In a bid to spur development in the region more than 7,000 kilometers of railway tracks will be laid in western China by 2010. The Ministry of Railways has announced plans to increase the track network in the west from 27,600 kilometers to around 35,000 kilometers by the end of 2010.
Important projects include railways between Lanzhou and Chongqing, and Guiyang and Guangzhou.
Connecting Gansu Province and Chongqing Municipality, the Lanzhou-Chongqing railway will become a trunk line, linking the nation’s southwestern and northwestern regions.
Another railway linking Guiyang, capital of Southwest China’s Guizhou Province, and Guangzhou, capital of South China’s Guangdong Province, is also expected to start construction soon.
But despite the massive amount of work, the west’s railways still lag behind railways in other parts of the country, in terms both of length and the number of high-speed routes.
The vast region accounting for more than 70 percent of China’s total landmass has only one third of the nation’s railway track.
Source: China.org.cn