Railway envisioned linking Xiongan to western neighbor

A high-speed railway will be built from Xiongan New Area, in North China's Hebei province, to Xinzhou in neighboring Shanxi province, according to the Shanxi government.

The railway was listed as one of the 15 key infrastructure projects that Shanxi will push forward this year, according to a government notice released recently.

No construction timeline was given.

Xinzhou, which is about 300 kilometers southwest of Xiongan, is the largest city by area in Shanxi. There's no railway linking it to Xiongan at present or to Baoding, where the new area is situated.

"Considering the economic role Xiongan will play for the country, the railway will be an important engine to drive development in the western part of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region," Liu Zhendong, deputy head of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Collaborative Development Office at Hebei University, was quoted as saying by Hebei Youth Daily.

Xiongan New Area, another innovative hub with national significance on par with China's Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area, has been in the process of planning and building since it was established in April last year.

The new area, about 100 km southwest of downtown Beijing, will help phase out noncapital functions from the capital, explore a new model of optimized development in densely populated areas and restructure the urban layout in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

Construction of transportation projects around Xiongan has begun, with the aim of linking to the outside.

On Feb 28, the construction of an intercity railway between Beijing and Xiongan began.

It will cut travel time between the capital and Xiongan by about 60 percent to about 30 minutes when it begins operations at the end of 2020, according to the builder, Beijing-Shenyang Railway Passenger Transport Beijing-Hebei Co.

The builder also disclosed that a high-speed line linking Xiongan and Shangqiu in Central China's Henan province is being planned.

Four north-south high-speed railway lines and two east-west rail routes will serve Xiongan in the future, according to a map provided in a report by China Central Television in January.

The Xinzhou-Xiongan line is a section of one of the two eastwest routes. Another section is the Tianjin-Xiongan intercity railway.