Ministry of Planning and Investment has submitted an investment report of Hanoi-HCM City high-speed railway project (after a careful preparation and appraisal) to the government. After being approved and presented at the National Assembly, the project will be officially started.
According to the report, the project has total investment capital of $55.853 billion, which will be kicked off from 2014 and the first phase of 2014-2020 on building Hanoi-Vinh section and Nha Trang-HCM City will be finished and operational. In the second phase from 2020 to 2030, the Vinh-Da Nang railway section will be completed and finally, the whole North-South railway will be put into full operation by 2035.
Total land area for construction is estimated at 4,170 hectares including 383.7 hectares of land in urban areas, 813 hectares of rural land and remainder of agricultural and forestry land.
Total length of the railway project is designed at 1,570 kilometres including 1,043 km of overhead bridges, bypass bridges, tunnels and road surface, 27 train stations, and five road repairing and maintenance facilities along with the national railway.
Regarding technology, after considering the high-speed railway technology of many countries, the state's appraisal council proposed to apply the Electric Multiple Unit (EMU) technology that is being used for Shinkansen train of Japan. As designed, the usage speed of the railway will reach 300 kilometres an hour and the rail width is 1,435 mm. After being finished, the new North-South high-speed railway will be used to carry passengers and the current national railway will be used to transport goods.
In the world, the developed countries such as Japan, Germany, France, Korea and China all focus on investing in high-speed railway. The nations that have not yet built high-speed railway, like Indonesia, Brazil or US, are drawing up such an investment project. As per forecast, the world's demand for carrying passengers by high-speed trains by 2020 will be 48,000 arrivals a day so the investment preparation at this time is very urgent and necessary.
With total estimated expense of $56 billion, the capital mobilisation for the project is very difficult, which was concerned just in the preparation process.
Before the high-speed railway project was submitted to the government, many people had proposed Vietnam should upgrade the current North-South railway into the high-speed railway in order to cut down the investment expense. But the proposal raised a lot of new problems so the projection of building new North-South high-speed railway had been selected along with big difficulties in raising capital.
There are now two capital raising plans. First, the cost for building infrastructure will be raised from state budget, ODA, and Ordinary Capital Resources (OCR). And the high-speed trains will be invested by the state-guaranteed enterprises. Second, both infrastructure and high-speed trains will be invested under the method Public Private Partnership (PPP). In terms of the expanse on ground clearance, capital mobilisation will be conducted from earnings of turning land into urban areas, industrial zones along high-speed railway or building trade centres and service areas at train stations.
According to finance ministry, in the first phase, there should focus on raising ODA (especially from Japan). When ODA supply is limited as for infrastructure projects, we [Vietnam] will use state budget as well as G-bond capital for the project.
As estimated, the investment value for one kilometre of the high-speed railway project is $35.6 million equalling to 680 billion dong, which is the average investment level compared with the world's investment band. In details, investing in one kilometre of Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway was $24.3 million, $47.2 million in Germany and $52.9 million in Korea.
Economists said that the more impotence is the efficiency of project based on detailed calculation, capital mobilisation.
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