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The Vietnam News

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China to refurbish rail link to Vietnam

China will spend tens of millions of dollars (euros) refurbishing the nearly century-old rail link between the southwestern city of Kunming and Vietnam's capital Hanoi, state media reported Friday. Ten new diesel locomotives and 200 new passenger cars are being bought for the line at a cost of 140 million yuan (US$17 million; euro 14 million), newspapers and the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Hundreds of millions more yuan (tens of millions of dollars, euros) will be spent on track upgrades, Xinhua said.

The line, built by French investors in 1910, is to be a key part of the envisioned 5,382-kilometer (3,336-mile) Trans-Asia Railway that would allow uninterrupted travel from Kunming to Singapore. Malaysia proposed the railway in 1995 and a final route was picked in 2000 running through Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. But progress stalled amid the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s and problems coordinating between different countries.

Xinhua quoted Liang Zhongyu, chief engineer of the Kunming Railway Bureau, as saying work on the Chinese sections of the railway would be completed by 2015 at a cost of about 13 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion; euro 13 billion).

The Associated Press - November 5, 2004