"The train takes me to big cities on business trips," said Wei, who deals in vegetable sales. "I'm responsible for negotiating deals. After the deals are made, my fellow folks back home would organize the collection of goods and dispatch them through the railway."

Thanks to the railway, which starts from the capital city of Nanning in Guangxi and runs 898.6 km westward to the capital Kunming in Yunnan Province, Tianyang County has become nationally reputed as one of the leading vegetable suppliers.

Tens of thousands of tons of vegetables from the county are freighted to elsewhere in China every year, including Nanning, Kunming, Wuhan and Beijing.

The county was a big vegetable producer as far back as a decade ago, but much of the vegetable crop ended up rotten in the fields owing to poor transportation facilities.

The railway which began running in late November 1997 has brought great benefits to all the 20 million people in the 29 counties and cities along its route, mostly relatively less-developed areas targeted by national poverty relief programs.

"Without the rail routes, we wouldn't have made so much progress in such a short period," said Li Yuecheng, deputy head of the Buyi-Miao Autonomous prefecture in the southwestern part of the neighboring Guizhou Province.

Li said the prefecture's GDP surged to 6.72 billion yuan (US$810 million) in 2001, a sharp contrast with the level of around 1.48 billion yuan (US$180 million) before the railway was built.

Thanks to the railway, the number of needy locals living below the poverty line in Baise prefecture in Guangxi, one of the old revolutionary bases during the revolutionary war years prior to the founding of new China in 1949, has slumped to 190,000 as against 2.33 million before it was built, according to Ma Biao, secretary of the prefect Ural Committee of the Communist Party of China.

Because of the railway, tourism along the line has boomed. The unique scenic landscapes and graceful flavors of local ethnic groups in Guangxi, Yunnan and Guizhou, now easy to access, have annually attracted 2 million domestic and overseas tourists annually.

"We had few tourists before the railway was open," said tourist guide Zhang Yuqin of Maling River Valley. "But nowadays people swarm to this place on special tourist trains."

A Chinese reporter who has followed the railway's progress said it had really lived up to its nickname - "the largest poverty-relief project in China".

(Xinhua News Agency December 18, 2002)