China is planning to build a 2,000-kilometre high-speed railway between Beijing and Guangzhou to speed up ground transportation from North to South China.

Passengers will be able to finish their trip from the capital to Guangzhou in 10 hours instead of the 23 hours that are needed on the existing railway line.

The second Beijing-Guangzhou line, which crosses five provinces and links major cities including Zhengzhou, Wuhan and Changsha, will cost at least 200 billion yuan (US$24 billion).

It will be another massive infrastructure project in China and will help maintain the country's strong economic growth momentum.

Having been included in the country's long-term plans, the project will move into the spotlight when the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway is completed in about five years' time.

"We will turn to the construction of the Beijing-Guangzhou railway probably in the next Five Year Plan (11th, 2006-2010) period,'' said Zhang Jianping, railway and civil aviation director of the Infrastructure Department at the State Development Planning Commission.

The country is to build the new Beijing-Shanghai railway in this Five-Year-Plan period once it chooses between magnetic-suspended trains or wheel track trains.

Building a railway line for magnetic-suspended trains will cost about 300 million yuan (US$36 million) per kilometre, while wheel tracks cost about 100 million yuan (US$12 million).

Zhang said it would not be a technical problem to build a second Beijing-Guangzhou railway line to run a train at the speed of more than 200 kilometres, but it will be very costly because of its complexity.

And it will even be more expensive if the line goes through populated areas because of the huge cost in moving the residents to make way for the railway.

It is hard to estimate exactly how much the railway line will cost but it will begin at 200 billion yuan, said Zhang.

The country has been speeding up railway transportation in the past few years. But traditional railway lines have reached their speed capacity limits as the trains are now running at 150 kilometres per hour.

( China Daily April 17, 2002)