---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:56:00 -0500 (EST)

Trans-Asian railwav takes another step forward: an
agreement on the Trans-Asian Railway network should speed up progress of a
project whose history goes back 40 years, by Mike Knutton

International Railway
Journal Feb 1, 2006

AN intergovernmental agreement towards the end of last year is
expected to play a catalytic role in the construction and upgrading of
railway lines in Asia, with the aim of creating an 81,000km
Trans-Asian Railway (TAR) network involving 27 countries. Ultimately,
the project could provide links from multiple Asian destinations to
Europe in an integrated international, multimodal network; and provide
improved access for 12 landlocked countries to major ports.

Representatives of most of the nations involved met under the aegis of
the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the
Pacific (Unescap) at its headquarters in Bangkok at the end of
November 2005 and agreed draft plans to formalise the TAR network.

The agreement is not a blueprint for action, more a framework to take
the project forward through mechanisms to find synergies between
national projects and to ensure a coordinated approach. It authorises
a working group to meet every two years as a forum where policymakers
and railway managers can define a common vision, agree joint
programmes, and benchmark progress. The draft will be presented at the
62nd session of the Unescap Commission in Indonesia in April followed
by a signing ceremony in November.

Mr Kim Hak-Su, executive secretary of Unescap, hailed the agreement as
"ushering in a new era of cooperation, and creating a partnership for
regional integration". Mr Barry Cable, Unescap's director of transport
and tourism, said there had been significant commitments during the
past year, including pledges to construct rail links between Thailand
and Laos, and India and Nepal.

"One of the key features of the draft agreement is that landlocked
countries should have inland ports with a sort of one-stop service for
customs and goods clearance like we have at sea ports. For example,
Nong Khai (in northern Thailand) has the potential to be developed as
an inland port for landlocked Laos," he said.

However, historically, national railways generally developed in
isolation to their neighbours so the key to the TAR lies in filling
the missing links and coping with breaks of gauge by measures such as
transhipment, bogie change, or use of variable-gauge bogies. For
example, the southeast Asia section of the TAR Network running between
Singapore and Kunming, capital of the south China province of Yunnan,
has nearly 1300km of missing links and a break of gauge at the
Thailand-China border (1000mm to 1435mm).

Cable estimates that it will take two decades to complete the whole
network, though the Singapore-Kunming Rail Link (SKRL) could be
achieved sooner thanks to financial pledges from organisations such as
the Asian Development Bank to finance the Bangkok-Cambodia part for
completion during the next few years.

SKRL, which was proposed at the 5th Association of South East Asian
Nations (Asean) Summit in Bangkok in December 1995 with Malaysia as
the project coordinator, has a common route from Singapore, through
Malaya to the Thai capital, Bangkok. From here, an eastern route
passes through Cambodia and Vietnam before entering China south of
Kunming; a western route enters Myanmar at Three Pagoda Pass and then
runs north to cross into China west of Kunming at Muse; while a
central route runs north from Bangkok to enter Laos near Vientiane and
then runs east to meet the eastern route near Tan Ap in Vietnam .

The missing links on the eastern route are: Poipet-Sisophon, 48km;
Phnom PenhLoc Ninh, 254km; and Loc Ninh-Ho Chi Minh City, 129krn.
Feasibility studies of the Poipet-Sisophon section and of track
rehabilitation and upgrading of other parts of the Cambodian network
are underway. A preliminary technical study for the Phnom Penh-Loc
Ninh section has been completed, while the full feasibility study for
the Loc Ninh-Ho Chi Minh City line has been completed and funding is
now being sought abroad for construction work.

The missing links on the western route are from Nam Tok to Three
Pagoda Pass (153km) in Thailand and Three Pagoda Pass to Thanbyuzayat
(110km) in Myanmar. Feasibility studies are underway on both sections
and are due to be completed this year.

Laos has no operating railway at the moment but a 20km section from
Nong Khai on the Thai border to the Lao capital, Vientiane, has been
started with rails laid on the Friendship border bridge over the
Mekong river. More than 500km of new railway is required for a
west-east spur line to link Vientiane with the eastern route at Tan Ap
via Thakhek, with a 66km branch from Tan Ap to the port of Vung Anh.

Malaysia is the current chairperson of the special SKRL working group
for a three-year term that started in 2004. Mr Mohd Salleh, managing
director of Malayan Railway (KTM) puts the total cost of this part of
the Trans-Asia Railway at SUS 1.8 billion. "The SKRL is seen as
offering less developed Asean countries such as Cambodia, Laos,
Myanmar, and Vietnam , an opportunity to achieve economic prosperity
through the concept of the borderless economy," he told me in Kuala
Lumpur.

The most important element, he points out, is the willingness of the
government of each participating country to commit itself to a
substantial financial investment, particularly regarding the missing
links, but also in track doubling existing lines and installing modern
signalling and communications. "The willingness to invest will be
dependent largely on the level of political support from each
country," said Salleh.

Malaysia's task as chairperson of the special working group is to seek
ways and means to move the project forward. The group is the forum
within which the transport policy makers and railways of SKRL
countries will define a common vision, adopt joint programmes of
action, and identify investment requirements and sources, and
benchmark progress.

Malaysia has been actively involved in planning and providing
technical assistance for the 48km Poipet-Sisophon missing link. It is
donating used rails recovered from the Rawang-Ipoh track doubling
project to Royal Cambodian Railways in order to speed up the
construction of this link.

The SKRL network offers capacity, speed, and distance advantages
compared with seagoing vessels. For example, the sea route from Penang
goes south through the Straits of Malacca then north to Bangkok from
Singapore to end up at one of the Vietnamese or Chinese ports. This
sea journey takes about two weeks compared with one week by rail.

"The time saved by moving goods via rail means that relatively more
goods can be transported within a similar time frame compared with
either road or sea. This is due to a better turnaround, and the end
result is increased volume of trade," said Salleh. "KTM expects to
gain with increased traffic from Europe bound for China and the
Indo-China countries. Cargoes will have to be unloaded at ports on the
west coast of the Malayan peninsula and transferred to SKRL freight
trains. Port Klang, near Kuala Lumpur, and the Port of Tanjung
Pelepas, near Johor Bahru, can become an important regional loading
and unloading hub."

Four Corridors

The full four-corridor TAR network is now being pursued following
individual corridor studies developed from the original project of the
1960s, which aimed to provide a continuous 14,000km rail link between
Singapore and Istanbul, Turkey, with possible further connections to
Europe and Africa.

TAR routes in operation today cover 80,900km distributed as follows:

* Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore,
Thailand, Vietnam ), 12,600km

* Northeast Asia (China, Korea, Mongolia, North Korea, and the Russian
Federation), 32,500km

* Central Asia and Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan) 13,200km, and

* South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey)
22,600km.

The biggest challenge apart from providing the missing links is the
four different rail gauges across Eurasia. Turkey, Iran, China, the
two Koreas, and most of Europe use the 1435mm standard gauge; Finland,
Russia, and the former Soviet republics use 1520mm gauge; most of the
railways of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka use 1676mm
gauge, while most of southeast Asia operates on metregauge tracks.

In the northern corridor, for example, there are breaks of gauge at
the Polish-Belarussian border (1435mm to 1520mm), the Kazakhstan-China
border (1520mm to 1435mm), and the Mongolian-Chinese border (1520mm to
1435mm). Others include the Iran-Pakistan, India-Myanmar, and
Thailand-China borders.

Little progress was made with the project during the 1960s and 1970s
and it was only with the political and economic changes that took
place in the region in the early 1980s that TAR was revived. The
project was divided into studies of the four major corridors to define
the TAR network on a step-by-step basis.

In addition to the breaks of gauge and missing links, the studies
identified the major links of international importance; assessed their
conformity with technical requirements such as loading gauge,
axle-load, and speed; and appraised the compatibility of operational
practices (couplers, length of trains, etc) to evaluate the
possibility of cross-border movements.

In addition, the "soft" aspects of transport were reviewed including
tariff-related issues and the institutional framework pertaining to
freight movement across borders.

The draft intergovernmental agreement of last November represents
another step towards identifying an international intermodal network.
Together with an intergovernmental agreement on the Asian Highway
Network, which was similarly agreed in July 2005, the TAR agreement
should form a solid basis for a regional approach to transport
development. Unescap says that, through these initiatives, it is
trying to usher in a new era of cooperation with its member countries
and create a new partnership for regional integration.

Mike Knutton

Senior Editorial Consultant

Vietnam News List - vnnews-l
http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/vnnews-list.html
List owner: Stephen R Denney <sdenney@ocf.berkeley.edu>

To subscribe/unsubscribe send message to <majordomo@coombs.anu.edu.au>
with the body reading:

unsubscribe vnnews-l <your email address>
or
subscribe vnnews-l <your email address>