Tan Hui Yee wonders when Asia's cross-continental railway will be ready.

HOW long does it take to connect the rail links from Singapore to China?

That question probably rang loud more than 10 years ago when Malaysia’s then prime minister Mahathir Mohamed mooted the idea, as part of plans to give a leg up to the Mekong basin countries like Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

But the idea caught my imagination. Ten years ago, I fantasised about travelling from Britain - where I was studying - to Singapore by rail. But the tracks within Southeast Asia were still not linked when I graduated in 2000, so I took the plane home instead.

Ten years later, as Cambodia began rehabilitating its railways, I decided I was done waiting. I was going to head up the 5,000-km route even if some tracks were not up yet. And write about it.

I was both thrilled and terrified when my editor agreed to the plan.

Long-haul rail travel, I found, was not very popular among many Vietnamese, and almost a non-starter as far as Cambodia is concerned.

Locals were quick to warn me off their trains even before I set foot in the country. They felt it was too dirty, too uncomfortable and too slow in this age of budget air travel. After all, why spend two days on the train when you can cover the same distance in a few hours?

Our translators eyed us with bemusement when told that we were making the journey from Singapore to the edge of China by train where possible. 

Taking the rail route meant sometimes spending more than a day on the road, and getting up in the wee hours of the morning to hop onto cross-country trains which depart from the cities at first light.

Sometimes, as in the case of Cambodia, it meant getting up at the crack of dawn simply to check if the train was going to arrive at all. And scrambling to charm our way onto a freight train when the passenger service did not turn up.

But one only has to look at the ease of train travel across Europe to see the possibilities that await Southeast Asia if enough attention is paid to its railways.

It takes just about two hours to travel from London to Paris on the high speed Eurostar service. The usual seven-hour ride from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur could be cut to an hour with a similar service.

Granted, rail infrastructure requires massive investment and intimate inter-governmental cooperation that may not exist within the region now. But rail, increasingly, offers a environmentally friendly alternative to air travel at a time when oil prices are hitting the roof. Managed well, it can also help growing cities avoid the gridlock that comes when road systems are overwhelmed with motor traffic.

Asean has said that it hopes the Singapore to Kunming rail link will be completed by 2015. When that day comes, we can truly say that we have arrived.

Photographer Caroline Chia with senior writer Tan Hui Yee
at the end of their journey in He Kou, China.
ST Photo: Caroline Chia

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