Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 25 – The China
Railway Corporation has announced plans to build a high-speed rail line to Iran
via Central Asia. Not only will this railway bypass Russia, something Moscow
has very much feared, but it will reduce Russian influence in that region
because the new line will use the international gage rather than the Russian
one.
Initially, the Chinese government
company says, the new line, which is intended to link China with Europe, will
follow existing Russian gage tracks in Central Asia. (Russian tracks are 1520
mm apart, while those of most of the rest of the world are 1435 mm.) But in
time, Central Asian rail lines seeking to work with the Chinese will likely go
over to the world standard.
For China or anyone else to work
with Russian rails has meant serious delays at the border because rail cars
have to be lifted off wheels set for one gage and put them on others set for
the other gage. For those who want to use Russia as a place of transit, that
imposes two sets of delays and thus higher costs (turkist.org/2015/11/railway-china-central-asia-europe.html).
The new Chinese line will connect
Urumchi in Xinjiang to Tehran, passing through Almaaty in Kazakhstan as well as
the capitals of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. As such, it will undoubtedly have as much a
political impact as an economic one, being both a rebuff to Russia (ng.ru/economics/2015-11-24/4_primorie.html)
and an encouragement to people there to look to it rather than Russian routes
for transport (asiarussia.ru/news/10060/).
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