South China's Guangdong Province is expected to increase its total railway network from the current 1,883 kilometers to more than 4,000 kilometers by 2020.

With a total investment amounting to 139 billion yuan, Guangdong joined hands with the Ministry of Railway to accelerate construction of as many as nine railway projects that are about to set up around 2,164 kilometers of new railway lines in the province.

"Six railways are being constructed intensively with the investment reaching 9.54 billion yuan already, 50 per cent more of the total planned investment for the year," said a recent government report.

Based on an official estimate, Guangdong's total railway length will edge up to 4 percent of the country's total or over 4,000 kilometers when all the nine projects are finished in 2020. The number of the province's outbound railways will also increase to 5 from the current 3.

"Problems caused by its inefficient railway transportation as a constraint of economy are therefore expected to be solved then," the report said.

Guangdong is China's top GDP generator, claiming one-ninth of the country's total GDP. However, its railway construction turned out to be too far from enough to really catch up with its booming economy.

The current 1,883-kilometer railway network accounts for only 2.5 percent of the country's total rail network. Its railway coverage intensity just reaches 46 percent of the country's average, making itself China's fourth "shortest" province in terms of the total railway length.

"Development of Guangdong's railway lags far behind that of its economy... it is becoming a bottleneck that restricts Guangdong's social development," said Zhang Dejiang, Party committee secretary of Guangdong province. "We must step up efforts to expedite our railway construction."

Out of the nine projects, the construction of a new railway network linking cities in Pearl River Delta more conveniently is the one that gets many people's attention.

(HK Edition 01/26/2007 page6)