Amur River Bridge To Join Russian Far East With China

“The Heilongjiang branch of the Export-Import Bank of China has allocated over $96.5 million to construct the Chinese section of the Sino-Russian railway bridge. The first railway bridge over the Amur River should cut transportation times and boost trade,” RT reported earlier this month.

“The Exim Bank has conducted an inspection of the construction site, determined the demand for financing and issued a loan of 400 million yuan for the project and a loan of 200 million yuan to the contractor of the fourth engineering company of China Railway,” the Applied Economics Association of the Heilongjiang province told Interfax on Tuesday, May 12th.

According to RT “the 2,215-meter bridge will link the city of Tongjiang in Heilongjiang Province with Nizhneleninskoye in Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region. 

A project of the Russian-Chinese Investment Fund, it will be able to handle 21 million tons of cargo traffic annually. China has already invested about $153.7 million in the project with its total investment expected to be $425 million. The new route will reduce the distance to customers by about 700 kilometers compared to other rail routes.“

A railway bridge over River Amur in Khabarovsk. (RIA Novosti/Vyacheslav Reutov)

The first cross-border rail bridge over the Amur River is expected to be finalized by 2016. China and Russia intend to boost their bilateral trade to $100 billion this year.

The Amur bridge is part of the wider railway project linking Beijing and Vladivostok with Moscow (Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Siberian railways). China has already allocated $242 billion (1.5 trillion yuan) to build the high-speed rail link between Beijing and Moscow. The line will cut the journey time from five to ‘two days’ between the two capitals.

Amur bridge construction workers in China have completed two-thirds of their side of the first-ever bridge that will connect the country to Russia, officials have announced.

“But while the Chinese half is on target to be completed on time by November, work has yet to even take place on the Russian end (…) The bridge is being built through public-private partnerships with the private investment estimated at six billion roubles ($12milllion) divided equally between Russia and China,” The Siberian Times reports.