Four Eurasian Corridors

The full four-corridor Trans-Asian Railway (TAR) network is now being developed which aims to provide a continuous 14,000km rail link between Singapore and Istanbul, Turkey, with possible further connections to Europe and Africa.

TAR routes in operation today cover 80,900km distributed as follows:

• Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam), 12,600km

• Northeast Asia (China, Korea, Mongolia, North Korea, and the Russian Federation), 32,500km

• Central Asia and Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan) 13,200km, and

• South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey) 22,600km.

The biggest challenge apart from providing the missing links is the four different rail gauges across Eurasia. Turkey, Iran, China, and two Koreas, and most of Europe use the 1435mm standard gauge; Finland, Russia, and the former Soviet republics use 1520mm gauge; most of the railways of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka use 1676mm gauge, while most of Southeast Asia operates on metre-gauge tracks.

In the northern corridor, for example, there are breaks of gauge at the Polish-Belarusian border (1435mm to 1520mm), the Kazakhstan-China border (1520mm to 1435mm), and the Mongolian-Chinese border (1520mm to 1435mm). Others include the Iran-Pakistan, India-Myanmar, and Thailand-China borders.

Supplementary Text B

Russia proposes Bering Strait tunnel

Plans to build a 100km rail tunnel under the Bering Strait separating Siberia from Alaska, and 600km of connecting railways were presented at a conference on so-called mega projects in eastern Russia staged in Moscow on April 24, 2007.

The tunnel, which will cost up to $US 12 billion to build, will also contain a road, oil and gas pipelines, and electricity and optic-fibre cables. It forms part of a $US 65 billion public-private partnership scheme to supply oil, gas and electricity to North America.

A 3500km line is planned in Russia from Pravaya Lena, south of Yakutsk, to Uelen on the Bering Strait, while 2000km of new railway would be needed in North America across Alaska and northern Canada to the railhead at Fort Nelson. The railway could carry up to 100 million tonnes of freight a year, sufficient to pay back the cost of building it in 20 years.

Conversational practice

Exercise 49 Work in pairs. Make dialogues for the situations, using ways of making suggestions.

Example: You have got a terrible cold.

A: My head’s killing me! And my nose is so sore!

B: I think you should go to bed with a hot drink.

A: That’s a good idea. I’ll go right now.

B: Oh, that would be lovely!

a You’ve just got a job in Beijing , so you need to learn the Chinese language, and find out about Chinese people and culture as quickly as possible.

b You both have the evening free, and there’s nothing on TV.

c Your flat’s a mess, it hasn’t been decorated for ages, and the furniture is ancient. Suddenly you inherit some money!

d You can’t decide whether to go to the university (but you don’t know what to study) or have a year off and go round the world.

e It’s Christmas time! What can you buy for the different members of the class?

f You’ve been invited to the Queen’s garden party at Buckingham Palace in June. What are you going to wear? The weather in June is very unpredictable.