Indonesia’s Chinese-funded railway line starts test runs

The cost of the project also increased from the initial budget of 66.7 trillion rupiah (US$4.3 billion) to 113 trillion rupiah.

On Wednesday Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Indonesian investment minister Luhut Pandjaitan took a test ride along a 41km section of the line between Jakarta and Karawang.

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Luhut said later that the two countries were in talks about potentially extending the railway to Surabaya, the second largest city on Java.

The line is the fastest in Southeast Asia, with trains that have a top speed of 350km per hour.

The region’s previous fastest railway was another Chinese-built line, linking the country with Laos, where the trains have a top speed of 160km per hour.

The new trains cut across four provinces on Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, with a total of 13 tunnels and 56 bridges constructed for the project.

China Railway, part of the consortium that built the line, said the route avoided “unfavourable geography” such as volcanoes, and were modified for the country’s tropical climate and equipped with a safety system that can respond to earthquakes, floods and other emergency conditions.

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It also described the line as a “landmark project of pragmatic cooperation between China and Indonesia”, which adopted Chinese technology and adhered to Chinese standards.

“The Chinese and Indonesian participating units have fully learned from China’s successful experience in high-speed rail construction, adhered to the concept of ecological and environmental protection … and promoted the project’s construction in a scientific, orderly, high-quality and efficient manner,” the statement read.

While the state-owned China Development Bank was responsible for 75 per cent of the funding, raw materials such as cement were largely produced in Indonesia, according to China Railway, which said the project had created 51,000 jobs in the country.

“The Jakarta-Bandung [railway] will become a road of development, of people’s livelihoods, and a path to win-win results,” Lu Kang, China’s ambassador to Indonesia, told state-owned newspaper Global Times.

South China Morning Post