TransChina Shanghai-to-Chengdu railway now opens to Yichang from Wuhan

THE Trans-China Shanghai-Chengdu railway has been extended another leg to Yichang, still less than half way to Chengdu from Wuhan, located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze.

Travel time from Chongqing to Wuhan will now be cut from 10 to five hours because of the extension of the major east west railway that spans the country along the Yangtze River Valley, reports Xinhua.

The new railway is also linked to Beijing and Guangzhou line as well as to the Wuhan-Jiujiang line, the Wuhan-Guangzhou Express Railway, the Hefei to Wuhan line as well as the Beijing-Shijiazhuang-Wuhan Express Railway and to the central with the Mongolia to Jiangxi Coal Railway Channel which is still under construction.

The railway will help to form a rapid rail network covering central China, eastern China, northern China and southern China. The transit time from Yichang of Hubei province to Beijing now is reduced by eight hours, to Guangzhou by nine hours and to Shanghai by 16 hours.

This will have an enormous impact on national logistics for cities along the Yangtze and their hinterlands, said Wuhan Railway Bureau director Yu Zhoumin.

By 2011, there were 4,036 productive shipping terminals along the Yangtze, including 389 facilities that have more than a 10,000-tonne capacity. The river has eleven 100 million tonne-size ports with a throughput up to 1.6 billion tonnes.

The Wuhan Railway Bureau expects the Wuhan to Yichang railway will move 20 million passengers and 6.1 million tonnes of cargo a year at first, while in the long term, it will move 28.1 million passengers and 10 million tonnes a year.