More than 6.4 million people traveled by train in China on Saturday as students returning to colleges filled carriages across the country, the Ministry of Railways (MOR) said Sunday.

Stations continued to see massive numbers of passengers in the last several days of the 40-day Spring Festival travel season, which begins on Jan. 8 and ends on Feb. 16.

By Saturday, the country's railway authorities had sold 193.27 million tickets during the travel season, according to a statement posted on the MOR website.

"Railway traffic is generally in order," the MOR said.

The ministry put 711 more trains into service to cope with the increasing passenger flow on Saturday and has prepared 694 additional trains for Sunday's travel rush.

China's Spring Festival travel season, which lasts from Jan. 8 to Feb. 16 this year, witnesses the world's biggest human traffic flow every year as hundreds of millions of people, mainly migrant workers and students, travel across the nation.

China Northern Locomotive & Rolling Stock Corporation Limited (CNR) and Bangkok Mass Transit System Public Company Limited (BTSC) have signed an agreement to cooperatively explore metro market in Thailand.

BTSC, Thailand's most outstanding metro company, signed contract in 2007 to purchase 48 metro vehicles from China's Changchun Railway Vehicles Co., Ltd and bought 20 more based on the original contract in 2011.

At present, the company is bidding for more than one vehicle procurement projects in Thailand. Once BTSC wins the bid, it will take Changchun Railway Vehicles Co., Ltd as the first provider of the vehicles.

After 30 years’ development, China is pulling ahead in the global race for high-speed railway construction. And China's CNR is increasing efforts to develop into a global railways transportation industry and export base.

A subsidiary of China Railway Construction Corp Ltd has signed two projects in Africa with a total contract value of 9.1 billion yuan ($1.4 billion), the company said in a statement to the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

The value of the projects, located in Nigeria and Djibouti, equates to just under 2 percent of China Railway's 2010 operating income, the company said.

China Railway has actively pursued overseas investments this year. In late November, a consortium involving China Railway and Aluminum Corporation of China (Chinalco) announced a deal to develop an iron ore mine in Guinea.

The company is also part of a consortium of Chinese firms in talks with the Ecuadorian government on a gold mining project .

China's railway systems will experience high passenger flows over the next few days as college students return to school after their month-long winter vacations, the country's railway authorities said Tuesday.

On Monday, 4.58 million people crammed into trains and the country put 704 more trains into service to cope with the increasing passenger flow, the Ministry of Railways said in a statement on its website, adding that 760 additional trains are scheduled to be put into operation on Tuesday.

Snow and rainfall are forecast to continue in the country's southern regions for the coming three days, putting more pressure on the country's rail system, according to the statement.

The ministry said it has asked all stations to take precautions and strengthen services amid the bad weather to ensure safe transportation.

Spring Festival, or Chinese Lunar New Year, which fell on Jan. 23 this year, is the most important Chinese holiday for family reunions, making it a hectic time for China's public transportation system.

A total of 3.16 billion passenger trips are expected during the year's travel rush which will end on Feb. 16, up 9.1 percent from a year earlier. Of those journeys, 235 million are likely to be made by train, up 6.1 percent year-on-year, the ministry said.

Chinese railway police arrested 1,106 ticket scalpers during the Spring Festival and confiscated 9,822 train tickets, said a statement released by the public security bureau of the Ministry of Railways (MOR) on Monday.

Police cracked 987 ticket scalping cases and apprehended 132 gangs of ticket scalpers during the period, according to the statement.

The statement said railway police heightened their scrutiny over ticket scalping, as migrant workers and students rushing to return to work and school, respectively, left train tickets in short supply toward the end of the holiday.

Police increased patrols around ticket booths and traced booking phone calls and information related to online ticketing in order to detect scalping, it said.

For this year's Spring Festival travel rush, passengers were able to buy train tickets online or by telephone for the first time. They also had the option to queue to buy tickets directly from railway stations.

Mass Rapid Transit Authority has awarded CK Karnchane a 14bn baht contract for civil works on the 13 km elevated Bangkok Skytrain Green Line extension from Bearing to Samut Prakan which is scheduled to open in mid-2016. 

China Railway Eryuan Engineering Group has begun construction of a 37·4 km light rail system in Addis Abeba. Lines will connect Defence Forces Hospital to Ayat (17·3 km), Meskel Square to Kality (16·2 km) and Lideta to Menliki Square (3·9 km). China is meeting 60% of the US$490m cost of the scheme, which is scheduled for completion within two years. Further lines are planned. 

Chongqing monorail Line 3 was extended 21·8 km north to Jiangbei International Airport and south to Ertang on December 30. 

A 3·6 km southern branch of the Volgograd Metrotram line from Pionerskaya to Yel’shanka was opened in December, adding three more underground stations. 

The Makkah metro has been successfully converted to automatic operation under the control of Thales SelTrac CBTC; drivers have been retained on board to close the doors. 

The 3 km Tram West extension of Zürich Line 4 from Escher-Wyss-Platz to Altstetten was opened on December 11. 

Iraq’s National Investment Commission has called tenders for the construction of an 18 km monorail with 20 stations serving the city of Karbala. 

On December 30 MPK Kraków inaugurated a 1·8 km tram extension from Kobierzynska to Ruczaj, the first stage of the 6 km Line 12. 

A 7·6 km southern extension of the Seoul Bundang Line from Jukjeon to Giheung opened on December 28. 

In January Tel Aviv Metropolitan Mass System called tenders for the construction of tunnels for the 22 km Red and 35 km Green light rail lines. 

Construction of a 10·8 km eastern extension of Chengdu metro Line 2 to Longquan East officially began on December 28.

INDIA'S RAIL CORRIDORS
India's achievements on high-speed rail are near zero. Despite having one of the largest networks on earth at 1,14,500 km, most of the lines require serious maintenance and upgradation. A large portion of it is in the double-line mode. Of India's total route length of 64,215 km, less than a third is electrified. While the route kilometres of the Indian rail network have increased by just approximately 18 per cent in the last 60 years, it has grown threefold in China. Though some resolute policy measures had put Indian railways on course, things seem to be unravelling again. Instead of fuelling economic growth, Indian railways seem to be re-emerging as a moribund pool into which huge investments disappear.

But there is still hope. In its efforts to speed up its transport infrastructure, Kerala plans to set up a high-speed rail corridor between Thiruvananthapuram and Mangalore, a distance of 580 km, reducing the travelling time to around three hours. Though the costs, estimated at Rs 1.18 lakh crore might seem astronomical, the economic and environmental benefits would still work in its favour.

Behind the bamboo curtain, bullet trains are merrily chugging along, seamlessly connecting thriving cities like the capital Beijing with the industrial city of Shanghai — a distance of 1318 km, covered in less than five hours. While the full economic logic behind the Chinese bullet trains will take several more years to manifest, it is the philosophy behind it that is even more compelling — the crisp, coherent and concise environmental logic.

While combating the developed countries and holding forth eloquently on the rights of developing countries at successive international environmental forums, at home, the Chinese have been doing their homework, and practising it too. And the bullet train is a classic example. The prime reason for the execution of the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train project was not only the growing demand for faster transport between two of China's biggest cities, but also the blinding smoke and choking pollution that road vehicles were increasingly spewing out into the environment.

POLLUTION CONTROL
It's not that the high-speed trains have been able to mitigate vehicular air pollution overnight. The winter morning air in Beijing is still choked with pollutants, as a haze hangs across the city. But slowly, the problem is being addressed.

The high-speed rail network, said Mr Zhou Xinjin, an economist working with the Transportation and Economics Institute at the Chinese Academy of Rail Sciences, has not only helped to mitigate China's vehicular pollution, but is also proving to be the platform for China's transition into a low-carbon economy.

Global economic growth has been driven by high-energy consuming industries, with conspicuous emission-driven technologies which battered the delicate ecological balance during the last century. This was the case with the transport sector. Now, the time has come to set the house in order, and plan for the next level of growth — a low-carbon economy with low energy consumption, low pollution and low effluent discharge. The low-carbon economy would follow the agriculture and industrial civilisations, Mr Xinjin said. And one major hub of the low-carbon economy would be low-carbon transportation.

And the near-zero-emission bullet train is perceived as a vehicle that could be the stepping stone into the next level of growth. Running on electricity, it leaves behind no trail of smoke, fumes and hardly any dust. “The proportion of high-speed railway in China kept growing and effectively put forward energy conservation and emission reduction,” Mr Xinjin said.

ENERGY CONSUMPTION
Buttressing the economic and environmental rationale, Japanese research has proved that energy consumption per person per km was more than five times for cars and planes, as against high speed trains (5.6 : 5.3 : 1).

In the case of mileage per person, it was found that planes consumed the highest unit of fuel, followed by cars and high speed trains (1 : 0.62 : 0.26). Taking into account various polluting gases and suspended particulate matter, railways in general, and high-speed trains in particular, were found to be far less polluting than cars and planes.

Further, scientists have highlighted a list of economic and environmental advantages of high-speed trains.

On a very comfortable high-speed train journey from Hong Kong to China, which provided everything from bathroom slippers to a hot water kettle, to individual TV sets and piped music, a senior Chinese mandarin said that the idea of the bullet train was conceived as thousands of cars took to the highways, as business and transport needs between Beijing and Shanghai soared.

Hence, the introduction of the bullet train not only reduced the growing threat of traffic snarls on Beijing-Shanghai highways, where thousands cars jostled for space spewing out pollutants into the atmosphere, but also reduced travel time and made it accessible to the middle-class, compared to the higher costs of air travel. The bullet train has been a success for both economics and ecology in China — making it the first and only country to have a commercial train service on overhauled conventional rail lines that can reach 350 km per hour, the Chinese mandarin said.

It is time that India emulated the Chinese success story to enter into the next phase — low-carbon economic growth.

Although not at the grandiose scales as in China, India too has been making modest plans. In the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, India made plans to construct a new Dedicated Freight Corridor covering approximately 2762 route km along two routes — the Eastern corridor linking Ludhiana with Daukuni, and the Western corridor from JNPT to Tughlakabad / Dadri.

But it is time that India began thinking more ambitiously: beyond the structured conventional rail system and for a low-carbon future.

It might cost billions of dollars in investment. But as Mr Xinjin has pointed out, so would the cost of building airports and buying aeroplanes — or for that matter, the huge investment that would be required in building India's ambitious North-South and East-West road corridor.

And India won't be planning for its future transportation needs alone: but also for a greener and less polluting, low-carbon environment.  

More than 20 Chinese and Canadian companies on Thursday signed cooperative deals of about $3 billion on the sidelines of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's China visit.

The deals, covering areas including aviation, finance, rail transit, mining, telecommunications, construction, environmental protection, education, and pharmaceuticals, were signed at the fifth China-Canadian Business Forum.

"The economic and trade cooperation is an important driving force for the development of China-Canada relations," said Chinese vice-premier Li Keqiang while addressing the forum, adding China's 12th five-year development plan and Canada's strategy to promote diversity of trade and investment provide broad prospects for bilateral cooperation.

He called on the two countries to give full play to the bilateral Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement and further enlarge two-way trade and investment.

China will increase imports of Canada's advantage products, Li said.

He said the two countries should establish long-term and stable cooperation on energy resources, conduct more energy trade, and promote more large-scale cooperative programs on oil and gas and mining.

The vice premier also said the two sides should strengthen cooperation on energy conservation and environmental protection, finance and pharmaceuticals, while enlarging cooperation on education, tourism, culture and between localities, in order to consolidate China-Canada cooperation.

Harper said Canada felt inspired by the sound momentum of bilateral trade and cooperation, adding that China's development is Canada's important opportunity. He also vowed to provide better conditions for cooperation between companies.

Prior to the forum, Li and Harper held a brief meeting.

During the meeting, Li spoke highly of the development of China-Canada relations and said China is ready to work with Canada to strengthen dialogue and exchanges, expand cooperation in trade, energy resources, technology and education, so as to push forward their strategic partnership.

Harper said Canada attaches high importance to its relations with China and will keep frequent high-level exchanges with China and strengthen dialogue and consultation in multilateral affairs.

The China-Canada Business Forum was established by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade and Canada-China Business Council in 2005. More than 500 people from the two countries' companies, governments and academies attended the forum.

This is Harper's second visit. He will fly to Guangzhou in South Guangdong province and Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality after leaving Beijing.
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1. CSR gets off to flying start in “twelfth five-year” period

Facing the complex and volatile economic environment, CSR actively responded to market changes, duly adjusted business strategies, worked hard and made innovation, thus overfulfilling business targets with steady growth in operating revenues and enormous year-on-year increase in business benefit, and getting off to a flying start in the “twelfth five-year” period. As a result of business assessment for 2010 released by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, CSR ranked among Class A enterprises.

2. Central leaders including Xi Jinping visit CSR

Xi Jinping, member of the Standing Committee of the Central Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee and vice president of the State; He Guoqiang, member of the Standing Committee of the Central Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and secretary of the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and Li Changchun, member of the Standing Committee of the Central Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee visited CSR on March 21, May 7 and June 18 respectively, giving important instructions in corporate development, encouraging the company to make innovation, go global and build national brands.

3. CRH380A operates smoothly on Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway 

On July 1, Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway was open to traffic, on which 46 CRH380A units were put into operation, accounting for 53% of all launched bulletin trains; after CRH380BL was recalled, the Ministry of Railways MOR mobilized 20 more CRH380A units for online operations on Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway. According to statistics, CSR’s bullet trains operated in good conditions with a punctuality rate of nearly 100% and a failure rate of about 0.5 time per 1,000,000 km 2 times in accordance with MOR standard, thus being up to advanced world standards in terms of reliability. CRH380A’s steady operations gained high praise from the outside world and built a high-end brand image for CSR.

4. Faster test train offline

On December 23, a faster test train was launched in Qingdao. The train integrates technologies such as Ethernet ring network, IOT and wireless network, uses new materials such as carbon fiber, magnesium alloy and new nanometer sound-insulating materials, and increases body rigidity by 22.7% while reducing weight. The train’s launch marks a staged achievement in prospective researches on China’s bullet trains, and is of great importance to perfecting China’s bullet train technology system, gaining greater say in China’s high-speed railway field and promoting the development of world bullet train technology.

5. Ding Rongjun elected as CAE academician

On December 8, the Chinese Academy of Engineering CAE announced the list of new academicians in 2011. As a result, Ding Rongjun, executive director and general manager of CSR Zhuzhou Institute Co., Ltd. CSR ZELRI made the list. Ding has been committed to developing the technology of AC transmission and network control and transforming research results, and made China one of the world’s few countries that have mastered the technology. CAE academicians are the highest honor in the world of engineering technology. Ding became the second academician of CSR after Liu Youmei, thus enhancing the technical lead of the company in the industry.

6. CSR rated as global brand

On June 28, the World Brand Lab WBL published the list of China’s Most 500 Valuable Brands in 2011 at the World Brand Summit. As a result, CSR ranked second among China’s machinery brands with a value of 17.126 billion yuan. WBL rated CSR’s brand influence as “global”, and there were only 32 globally influential brands on the list. CSR has so far exported products to over 60 countries and regions and established partnerships with a number of world-famous companies and institutions, thus drawing increasingly wide attention from the world.

7. Foundation laid for domestic largest IGBT industry base

On May 25, the foundation laying ceremony for CSR’s high-power IGBT industry base was staged in Zhuzhou, marking the launch of China’s first 8-inch IGBT chip production line. The project boasts a designed annual production capacity of 120,000 8-inch chips and 1 million IGBT modules, making CSR the country’s only enterprise that has owned a complete industry chain linking chip design, chip manufacture, module encapsulation and system application, filling a domestic gap in the relevant technical field.

8. State Council’s high-speed rail inspection acknowledged

On August 27, Huang Shuhe, vice chairman of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, headed the high-speed rail safety inspection team of the State Council to CSR and several its subsidiaries for field inspection. To draw profound lessons from the “July 23” accident, the State Council launched the great inspection of high-speed rail safety from mid-August. The inspection team acknowledged CSR’s safety quality, and made an overall comment of “fast growth, strong momentum and rosy outlook”.

9. CSR ranks among top 10 innovative enterprises

On December 28, “China Independent Innovation Conference 2011” was staged at the Great Hall of the People. As a result, CSR ranked among the top 10 innovative enterprises. CSR attaches great importance to technical innovation, and won special and first national prizes for progress in science and technology for many times. In 2011, CSR invested 6.6% of its annual revenues in technological R & D, applied for 1,817 patents including 1,280 patents for invention and won 1,280 patents including 120 patents for invention.

10. Implementation Outline of 10,000 Core Talent Training in the “Twelfth Five-Year Period” released

From February 25 to 26, CSR held the first talent work conference in Beijing, summarizing achievements in talent work since the beginning of the “tenth five-year” period, systematically elaborating on the “twelfth five-year” strategic plans for human resources under the model framework of “four news and four modernizations”, and releasing the Implementation Outline of 10,000 Core Talent Training in the “Twelfth Five-Year Period”, to provide talent support for CSR to build an international company.

China will construct 6,366 kilometers of new railways in 2012, including 3,500 kilometers of high-speed lines, People's Daily reported on Thursday.

The year 2012 will be a historic year in China's railway history with the highest number of new lines scheduled to be constructed. Meanwhile, high-speed railway lines will surpass 10,000 kilometers.

Once the new high-speed line is put into service, the travel time from Beijing to Shenzhen in South China's Guandong province will be reduced to eight hours from the current fastest time of 23 hours.

Confronted with such a massive construction project, the railway ministry expressed its determination to guarantee the construction quality, saying they will solve any hidden quality issues before operation.

The railway ministry has also launched an overhaul over all projects under construction started since 2003.

Shanghai metro saw its second suicide in the past 10 days, stirring public criticism over the metro's perceived inability to prevent such deaths.

The service of Line 2 was suspended for more than 10 minutes on Sunday evening after a man leapt from the platform around 8 pm at Lujiazui Station. The man was declared dead on the scene, and local police are still investigating the case. There are no barrier doors equipped at the station.

A women committed suicide by jumping off platform at Nanjing East Road Station of the same line on Jan 27.

Shanghai Metro Line 2, which is only equipped with semi-closed barrier doors rather than enclosed screen doors in some of its stations, has become the focal point of critics. Netizens, especially Shanghai natives, are calling for the installation of glass barrier doors with a more secure design.

A netizen surnamed Chen wrote in a post on Sina Weibo that he "highly suggests barrier doors be installed". "Compared to other lines, Line 2 and Line 3 lack safety measures, which has made them targets for people seeking to commit suicide," he said, adding, "I'm always afraid of being pushed down from the platform when too many people are waiting for the metro."

Yin Wei, an official with the Shanghai Metro Operation Company, said that the original purpose of installing enclosed screen doors was "to save energy and protect the environment not preventing suicide".

In other words, the screens, which cost about 6 million yuan ($952,000) each to install, according to Sina Finance, were designed to prevent cool or hot air from leaving the station, reducing electricity use. "It's expected to save about 20 percent of electricity," said Yin.

Such doors have not been installed on most stations of lines 2 and 3 because the stations were not compatible with the door's design.

Without making any direct comments on the suicide on Sunday, Yin said the Shanghai Metro Operation Company "is merely an enterprise, and it's impossible for us to solve the problem of suicide."

One way that the subway system can prevent suicides is by training staff to pay more attention to potentially dangerous situations during their regular patrols, said Wang Feng, a professor at the department of psychology of East China Normal University.

"It's also not enough to just put a sign reading, 'Danger! Jumping off the platform is forbidden!'," she said. "We need to create an environment that makes anybody with those (suicidal) thoughts have cold feet or give a second thought before they act."

The Shanghai subway system averages about eight suicide attempts annually, the staff at the Shanghai Metro estimated. But in 2011, there were at least 11 attempts and five confirmed dead.

"There is a chain reaction as people follow suit after reading news stories about metro suicides," said Shan Huaihai, a worker at the mental health center in Xuhui district. "Also, there is a mental attachment to dying publicly. That's why they tend to take the jump in crowded stations, such as Lujiazui or People's Square."

Anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent of suicides in China are related to mental illnesses, and Shan believes the true figure is at the extreme upper end of this range. The suicide rate has been increasing in China, which has mainly been attributed to mental diseases, drug and alcohol dependence, population migration, family and marital problems, and life pressure.

Wang worries that too much media coverage will encourage more copycats because "those with weaker minds will only pick up the negative information in the newspaper".

Giving boost to railways, a Chinese locomotive producer has rolled out a low-cost magnetically levitated train claiming it to be more environmental-friendly train than the conventional ones.

The three-carriage train is designed to run at a maximum speed of 100 km per hour and carry 600 passengers, said Xu Zongxiang, general manager of Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive of China South Locomotive and Rolling Stock Corporation (CSR) located in central China's Hunan province.

Nearly 6.66 million people traveled by train on Saturday as the week-long Spring Festival holiday ended, railway authorities said Sunday.

Saturday was the biggest day for China's public transportation since the start of the holiday, the Ministry of Railways (MOR) said on its website.

To cope with the post-holiday travel rush, railway authorities added 815 more trains to the country's railways. Railway traffic has generally been orderly, the ministry said.

The Spring Festival travel season will last from Jan. 8 to Feb. 16 this year, with hundreds of millions of people, mainly migrant workers and college students, traveling for the country's most important holiday.

Travelers are expected to make around 3.16 billion passenger trips this year, up 9.1 percent from a year earlier, of which 235 million trips will likely be made by train, up 6.1 percent year-on-year.

Revenue services on Shenyang metro Line 2 between Santaizi and Quanyunlu began on January 9, serving business facilities being developed along the city’s ‘Golden Corridor’. Work on the 21?8 km north-south route with 19 stations began in 2006.

Line 1 had opened in September 2009. The capital expenditure on both lines totals 20bn yuan, fully funded by the Shenyang government.

The lines are operated and maintained by a joint venture of MTR Corp (49%) and the municipal Shenyang Metro Group (51%) under a 30-year contract.

With 3,500 kilometers of new high-speed railways expected to be put into use this year, the length of China's high-speed railways will exceed 10,000 kilometers, a senior railway official said.

Insiders said the construction of high-speed railways, which was halted due to funding shortage, will resume this year.

Yang Zhongmin, director of the planning department of the Ministry of Railways, said that all four of the planned North-South rail arteries for China's high-speed rail system will be complete, according to People's Daily on Thursday.

One of the four arteries, the Beijing-Shanghai line, opened in June. The others will connect Beijing and Guangzhou in South China, Beijing and Harbin in Northeast China, and cities on the southeast coast with high-speed railways.

Though a section of rail between Xiamen and Shenzhen will not be finished this year, the four arteries will start operation and significantly cut travel time between major cities, Yang said.

For instance, train travel from Beijing to Shenzhen will take eight hours instead of the current 24 hours, and trips from Beijing to Harbin will take only five hours instead of nine.

China's high-speed rail sector was hampered by a funding shortage last year, when money from the government's 4 trillion yuan ($635 billion) stimulus plan dried up and the government's tightened monetary policy, after which the ministry was unable to get bank loans. More than 10,000 kilometers of high-speed railway projects were halted.

Wang Mengshu, a leading rail tunnel expert, said on Thursday that railway construction is expected to resume this year.

Wang, deputy chief engineer at China Railway Tunnel Group, told China Daily, citing a recent railway working conference, that the work on 6,000 kilometers of halted railway projects will resume this year and funds will be allocated gradually.

"The ministry will also begin nine new railway projects this year, but none of them are high-speed railways," he said.

An article posted on Feb 8 on the website of the Chongqing development and reform commission, a branch of China's top economic planner, supports Wang's statement.

According to the article, Lu Dongfu, deputy minister of railways, said at a meeting on Dec 30 that the ministry plans to spend 406 billion yuan on 249 infrastructure projects this year.

The money will be used to complete 63 rail projects, continue work on 177 others and begin nine new ones. Besides, the ministry would like to begin 53 other projects this year.

But Yang Hao, a railway professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, said that the 53 projects would need the approval of the National Development and Reform Commission before ground could be broken on them.

The ministry has stressed that the plan for infrastructure spending is "subject to changes", and experts believe that funding is the crucial factor that could determine whether the full plan is carried out.

Zhao Jian, another railway professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, said it remains unclear how the ministry will pull together 400 billion yuan because it has clear access to only 80 billion yuan from the railway construction fund and other sources. "And even the 80 billion yuan is not enough to pay off the interest generated by the 2 trillion yuan debt the ministry owes," he said.

China has planned to build a railway network of 120,000 kilometers by 2015, including at least 16,000 kilometers of high-speed railways.

China's railway investment in infrastructure in the first month of 2012 decreased by 76 percent year-on-year to 8.7 billion yuan, hitting the lowest point since 2009, the Economic Information reported Thursday, citing statistics from the Ministry of Railway (MOR) website.

The railway fixed-asset investment reached 12.2 billion yuan, down 69.6 percent from the same period last year, according to MOR.

Wang Mengshu, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told the newspaper that the sudden decrease in railway investment is partly because many construction projects were stopped during the Spring Festival. Many funds were not in place, he added.

At a State Council executive meeting presided over by Premier Wen Jiabao on Wednesday, it was pointed out that private capital was encouraged to enter sectors like the rail industry.

Wang said allowing private capital into railway construction is beneficial as the infrastructure construction of railways needs huge amounts of money. However, good allocation plans and profits must be ensured in order to attract the private capital, he added.