It will be the logical step to link this system eventually with the railway system in Central Asia passing via and through Kazakhstan. As Mahathir explained during a visit to Kazakhstan in 1996, “In East Asia we are seriously studying a railway system linking Southeast Asia with China. It is something for politicians to invoke in the name of regional solidarity, integration, and development. It is something to strive toward, in bits and pieces, that will complement existing trade networks. The pan-Asian railway is more potent politically than commercially. Most studies have found that a pan-Asian rail system would complement maritime shipping rather than compete with it. Likewise, cargo shuttled between the two destinations would be cheaper if transported first to the coast and then by boat to Singapore. Putting aside intrepid travelers and railway aficionados, most people traveling from Kunming to Singapore would still prefer to fly, which will remain cheaper and faster. You probably need a new agreement for international rail transport for the region.”ĭepictions of the pan-Asian railway can be deceptive in a second sense: they presume there is sufficient demand for these services to exist. “They don’t talk about the actual modality of managing a system that is supposed to go across borders. “It’s a question for all the train investments because they just talk about building the lines and that is it,” explains Ruth Banomyong, head of the Transport Department at Bangkok’s Thammasat Business School. Of course, even if the entire network became whole overnight, a prospect that could cost $75 billion, differences in track gauges and procedures at borders would still constrain greater connectivity. Build the railways, these images whisper, and integration will follow. For an instant, it is easy to forget all that stands in the way. Infrastructure takes center stage, and Southeast Asia looks as accessible as Manhattan. Reflecting the pan-Asian railway’s enduring appeal, these maps are entrancing and make the exotic familiar. James Clark, a freelance writer who runs a travel agency, has pieced together these proposals in a subway-style map that he updates each year. Indonesia alone has planned over thirty-two hundred kilometers of railway. In addition to these three main routes, countries have proposed a dizzying number of supporting railways in the region. At Bangkok, the routes are intended to converge and continue south, passing through Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and terminating in Singapore. The eastern route would pass through Vietnam and Cambodia, the middle route through Laos, and the western route through Myanmar. Since Mahathir reenergized the plan, ASEAN has focused on creating three main routes stretching from Kunming, the capital of China’s Yunnan province, to Bangkok, Thailand. Although one-meter gauge is common throughout mainland Southeast Asia, China and Indonesia use different gauges, posing challenges for transshipments by land and sea. That made the system poorly equipped for handling standard-sized containers and larger volumes of cargo. When technical consultants for the UN studied the region’s infrastructure in the 1990s, they noted that narrow, one meter track gauge was often accompanied by light track, small trains, and slow speeds.
As of 2017, ASEAN nations were responsible for nearly 40 percent of the trans-Asian railway’s missing links. The UN “trans-Asian” railway, if completed, would entail roughly 118,000 kilometers of railway, nearly enough to circle the Earth three times.īut Southeast Asia has been the gap in these sweeping proposals.
The concept resurfaced in an even more ambitious form in 1960, when a regional planning body at the United Nations proposed highway and railway networks connecting the region. Versions of the idea have existed since the early 1900s, when British and French colonialists built some of the region’s first tracks and began drafting plans for more extensive networks. In 1995, Mahathir revived a plan for a “pan-Asian” railway network.
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