Ministry accelerates proposed HCMC-Can Tho high-speed railway plans

The Ministry of Transport is speeding up preparatory work for a proposed high-speed railway linking Ho Chi Minh City with Can Tho city in the Mekong Delta, a region with no access to railroads.

Deputy Transport Minister Nguyen Danh Huy has demanded careful studies for the railway in accordance with the country’s regulations on public investment and public-private partnership (PPP) models as it is "a difficult project with large scale and complicated technical features".

“The preparation for the project must match the overall planning for the national railway network, link with the North-South railway system, the trans-Asian railroads, and the planned railroad to the Cai Mep-Thi Vai port cluster,” Huy said in an announcement.

The deputy minister noted that relevant units must look at where stations are located with provincial plans for transportation development.

Vietnam’s Railway Project Management Board is required to make detailed studies on passenger and freight needs in order to work out suitable investment phases to assure cost-effectiveness.

The unit had earlier estimated the key project would cost up to $9 billion or so. The raiway will go through HCMC, Binh Duong, Long An, Tien Giang, Vinh Long, and Can Tho, which is the delta region’s hub. The total length is 174.5 km, and there would be 15 stations and 11 maintenance and repair stations on the route.

At present, Vietnam’s North-South railway ends in HCMC. It still uses a track gauge of about one meter which has been in use for more than 100 years, with no high-speed trains running on the single-track network.

The proposed HCMC-Can Tho line would be a high-speed route using an international track gauge of 1,435 millimeters. The proposal says the project, being double-track instead of single-track, would operate both passenger and freight trains. For passenger trains, the designed maximum speed is 190km/h and freight trains would run below 120km/h.

The investment model would come under the form of a PPP. Accordingly, the government would pay for site clearance, and private investors would mobilize capital for construction, trial runs, and delivery via a build-transfer-lease (BTL) contract.

According to the project’s consulting unit, the Mekong Delta region’s total transportation demand by 2035 would be over 133 million passengers and nearly 200 million tons of freight per year. For railway transportation, the estimates are 6.4 million passengers and 9.1 million tons of freight per annum.