November 27-2015
China’s railway authority has proposed a Silk Road high-speed railway connecting Iran to China’s northwest Xinjiang province through four of the five Central Asian states, a plan it said would overcome the cross-border connectivity problem of different rail standards.
He Huawu, chief engineer of China Railway Corp., put forward the proposal Thursday at a forum on the One Belt, One Road Initiative hosted by the China Civil Engineering Society.
His proposed route was from Urumqi, capital of the mostly Muslim province of Xinjiang, to Almaty in Kazakhstan, then to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, Tashkent and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, Ashgabat in Turkmenistan and finally linking to West Asia’s network at Tehran. Only Tajikistan of the five Central Asian “stans” would be missed.
He said the northeast-southwest line would be complementary to the existing railways in Central Asia, which mostly run southeast to northwest toward Moscow, state-run China Daily reported.
What’s more important, it would get rid of the incompatibility between the stans’ wide-gauge track systems and China’s standard-gauge system. The difference is 8.5 centimeters (3.3 inches). The czars adopted the greater width so that any invaders from Europe could not drive their troops straight down the tracks into Russia.
A new standard gauge line would benefit Iran by allowing deliveries from Iran to Central Asia to be made faster and more cheaply. It would also open easy access to western China for the first time—and link the Muslim part of China to Iran, likely to be seen as a political benefit in Tehran.
The 1.52-meter wide-gauge standard adopted for the Russian Empire has always been a headache because cargo must all be moved at the borders to railway cars on the 1.435 meter standard-gauge track adopted in almost the entire rest of the world, including China and Iran.
Shifting cargo at the border takes days and significantly cuts railway competitiveness against shipping by sea.
“The Khorgos station [between China and Kazakhstan] last year handled less than 17 million metric tons of cargo running at full capacity, but beyond the station, the east-west annual cargo transportation capacity is 100 million tons,” He said.
“Increased container traffic and sea container traffic shifted to land instead could justify the cost of building the line,” he said.
China Daily did not mention the costs or where the capital would come from, but the implication was that He planned for China to fund and own the rail line.
According to He, container trains and passenger trains could run on the same route. The only difference would be speed. A passenger train could run up to 300 kilometers per hour (185 miles per hour), while a container train would be limited to 120 kph (75mph).
Other experts cautioned that an Asian railway link has been under discussion for a long time and has not materialized mainly because of geopolitical concerns of the countries along the route.
