Society

Tibet railway extension under construction

By Xin Dingding (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-27 08:15

Tibetan children perform folk dances on Sunday to celebrate the start of the construction of an extention to the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the world's highest rail line. [Kelsang Dawa/Xinhua]

BEIJING - China on Sunday began construction on an extension to the world's highest rail link, the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. The construction will connect the Tibetan capital of Lhasa to Xigaze, Tibet's second largest city.

The extension, in the southwestern part of the autonomous region, will create a 253-km railway line. The work will take four years, with a budget of 13.3 billion yuan ($1.98 billion), Zhang Ping, head of the National Reform and Development Commission, said on Sunday in Lhasa.

The extension from Lhasa to Xigaze is the first extension of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, which opened in July 2006.

The new section will pass through five counties and over the 90-km long Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon, to reach Xigaze, a city with a history of more than 600 years and the traditional seat of the Panchen Lamas.

"It will play a vital role in boosting tourism in the southwestern part of Tibet and promoting the rational use of resources along the line," Liu Zhijun, minister of railways, said at the conference.

The extended rail line will be a single line with a speed of 120 km per hour. Nearly half of the line, or 115 km, will be laid in tunnels or on bridges.

"Laying rail tracks in tunnels in the mountains can avoid passing through the fragile natural reserves in Tibet," Wang Mengshu, a railway tunnel expert and member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told China Daily on Sunday.

A news release from the Ministry of Railways said that the extension line avoids four natural reserves in the area.

In addition, using tunnels can help reduce damage to the railway by earthquakes, since Tibet is prone to earthquakes, Wang said.

"But the tunnels will add to the difficulty of construction, as it will be impossible to lay the tracks as fast as in the previous construction of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, which was built on top of permafrost," he said.

The Qinghai-Tibet Railway is the world's highest railway. Some 960 km of its tracks are located 4,000 meters above sea level. About 550 km of the tracks run on frozen earth, the longest of any of the world's plateau railways.

The Qinghai-Tibet Railway's first section from Xining, capital of Qinghai province, to Golmud of Qinghai was completed and opened to traffic in 1984. Its second section from Golmud to Lhasa started construction in 2001 and opened to traffic in 2006.

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A spokesman with the Ministry of Railways said that the future railway network in Tibet will have a "Y" shape, with two extensions planned.

In addition to the extension from Lhasa to Xigaze, the other is from Lhasa to Nyingchi in the southeastern part of Tibet. Previous media reports said construction will begin in 2013 at the earliest.

Xigaze city is the administrative center of the Tibetan prefecture of the same name, a 182,000-sq-km area that neighbors India, Nepal and Bhutan. It is also famous for Qomolangma (known as Mount Everest in the West), which rises up from it.

Xinhua contributed to this story.