Cambodia on July 4 reopened the final stretch of a railway running from the capital Phnom Penh to the border with neighbouring Thailand in Poipet, the first time the line has been operational in 45 years.
The Asian Development Bank provided $13 million in 2009 to rebuild the missing link on the Western line which aims to slash travel time between the two countries and boost trade.
Cambodian transport minister Sun Chanthol called it “a historic day for our nation.”.
Cambodia and Thailand still have to hash out an agreement on trains crossing the border but Sun Chanthol said the two countries hoped to strike a deal soon.
“We have already connected the railways in Cambodia and Thailand,” he said.
“However, passengers cannot cross the border by train yet because there are three points in our railway agreement that we still haven’t managed to agree upon. Once the agreement is signed, Cambodians will be able to take the train from Poipet to Bangkok, and then in Thailand they can board a train all the way to Singapore,” he said.
A 48-kilometer portion of the railway near the border town of Poipet was destroyed in 1973 during the civil war. The rest of link to Phnom Penh had been suspended for more than a decade due to the poor condition of the track.
Now, Cambodia has more than 600 kilometers of train track extending from its northern border with Thailand down to the southern coast.
Royal Railway, the company in charge of managing railway traffic in Cambodia, will now purchase modern train engines and carriages to further improve and modernise its network, the minister said, adding that cross-border freight lines with Thailand are also under negotiation.