China started building a 200 kilometer-per-hour passenger railway Saturday on the border of northern Hebei and Shanxi provinces.

The line is the first passenger line of nine to start construction in the country this year. The line, with a length of 189.23 kilometers, runs from Shijiazhuang to Taiyuan, capital cities of the above provinces.

According to a mid- and long-term plan the Chinese government made last year, this line is part of a larger fast passenger line network.

With an investment of 12.64 billion yuan, the line will be completed in 2008. By then the trip from Shijiazhuang to Taiyuan will take only an hour. The new line is estimated to carry 15 million one-way passengers a year.

Since the line will be built in mountain areas, 94 bridges and 32 tunnels, including China's would-be longest tunnel with a length of 27.839 kilometers, will be needed, accounting for more than 60 percent of the total length of the railway.

Liu Zhijun, minister of railways, said this line will distribute the passenger flow and let the original passenger-goods mixed lines carry more coal from Shanxi, one of China's coal base.

China will build 120,000 kilometers of passenger lines by 2020.At present there is only one passenger line, which runs from Shenyang, capital city of northeast China's Liaoning Province to Qinhuangdao, a port of Hebei Province, with a length of 400 kilometers.

Source: Xinhua