The provincial government of Xinjiang autonomous region signed an agreement with the Ministry of Railways on 10 June to speed up construction of the region’s rail network.

The ministry has pledged to invest Rmb310bn between 2010 and 2020 to add more than 8,000km of rail tracks to the current total of 3,599km. By the end of the decade the local rail network, comprising four major north-south lines and four major east-west lines, will serve 90 per cent of towns in the region. Rail capacity for coal alone will exceed 500m tons a year; cargo volumes are expected to grow by 10 per cent a year and train journeys between Urumqi and Beijing will take no more than 12 hours.