Beijing: A senior official said China would operate bullet trains to Tibet, near the Indian border in Arunachal Pradesh, before July this year.
Lu Dongfu, chief executive of China State Railway Group Company Limited, on Saturday operated a 435km rail link with the regional capital Lhasa. .
Construction began in 2014 on the railway line connecting Lhasa with Nyingchi in eastern Tibet. It is the first electrified railway in Tibet and is expected to start in June 2021.
The track work was completed by the end of 2020, the report states.
The railway has a designed speed of 160 km per hour, according to Tibet Railway Construction Company Limited, a subsidiary of China State Railway Group.
China aims to extend the total service life of its express train network to about 50,000 km by 2025, by 37,900 km by the end of 2020, Lu said.
The high-speed network will cover 98 percent of the cities with more than 500,000 residents, he said.
Lu said China’s self-developed Fuxing trains operate at speeds of 160 km / h to 350 km / h.
China is increasing its train network in the country’s southeastern Tibet Autonomous Region, which connects its remote parts with the Chinese mainland.
Last December, the railway was completed for a railway line connecting the cities of Lhasa and Nyingchi in Tibet near Arunachal Pradesh.
The Sichuan-Tibet Railway will be the second railway to Tibet after the Qinghai-Tibet Railway.
It passes through the southeast of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, one of the world’s most geologically active areas.
China has also included the construction of a “passageway” connecting Tibet with South Asia in the 14th five-year plan starting from this year.
China will support Tibet in building the transit route to South Asia, reads the Xinhua report with the 14th planning document submitted to the Chinese parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC).
The NPC’s annual session began here on Friday.
“The autonomous region of Tibet in China will be supported to build an important gateway to South Asia,” the report said.
Although the Xinhua report is not mentioned, China has long planned to build the Trans-Himalayan multidimensional connecting network through Tibet and Nepal, as part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Nepal under the current government of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli in particular has strengthened the trans-Himalayan connecting network with China.
Source: Telangana Today