China considers option to build the railway in Iran

Almaty. January 18. Silkroadnews - The government of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China plans to start developing over the project on the construction of the railway to Iran, Russian mass-media reports.
The new branch will also pass on the territory of Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
“The preliminary works implementation on the railway was included into the draft of the 13th Five-Year Plan for the development of the region in 2016-2020, which will most likely be accepted on Saturday, January 16,” the newspaper writes.
Representatives of the Ministries of Transport and the Railway departments of five countries signed a document on this railway line in December 2014, the newspaper wrote not giving though any further details about the project. According to “China Daily”, the central government of China assigns Xinjiang a key role in the implementation of the initiative “the Economic Belt of the Silk Road” due to region’s favorable geographic position, and the construction of a new railway line is a part of the project.
Last November “China Railway Corp” introduced a large-scale project for the construction of high-speed railway between the countries of the region. According to the data, it is expected to connect the administrative center of Xinjiang Urumqi with Almaty in Kazakhstan, Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, Tashkent and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, Ashgabat in Turkmenistan and Tehran in Iran.
The Silk Road Economic belt is the project of building the transport, energy and trade corridor between Central and South Asia and Europe. It directs to strengthen the economic cooperation and intensification of scientific and technological cooperation between the states. The idea of the project was proposed by the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping in September 2013.
The project provides for the formation of a common Euro-Asian economic and trade space and transcontinental transport corridor. For China, one of the main goals of the project is to reduce the time of delivery of goods to Europe.