A major section of a new railway that links China's west and east, which experts believe will boost the economic integration of China's western, central and eastern areas, has been completed.
The last rail for the 955.35 km section running from the capital city of Xi'an in northwestern Shaanxi Province to Hefei, the capital of east China's Anhui Province, was laid on Wednesday.
The entire line, running from Xi'an to Nanjing in eastern Jiangsu Province, will run 1,027 km. It has taken 100,000 railway builders across the country three years to do the job. And the construction of the remaining part, from Hefei to Nanjing, is scheduled to begin in the latter half of this year.
Chang Zhimin, deputy director of the Xi'an-Nanjing Railway Project, said that the Xi'an-Hefei part is expected to go into operation by spring next year. The speed will be set at 80 km per hour initially.
Meanwhile, another railway that links China's outlying needy western regions with the developed eastern coastal areas is the 1,736-km rail route between Lanzhou, the capital city of Gansu Province, to Lianyungang City in northern Jiangsu Province, was completed in the early 1950s, about half a century ago.
(Xinhua News Agency June 18, 2003)
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