Southeast Asian nations will seek to raise $2 billion later this year to complete a railway system that will eventually stretch from China to Singapore and link eight countries in the region.
The Singapore-Kunming Rail Link working group will hold an investors' seminar later this year, possibly in Kuala Lumpur, to raise the funds, said Ong Keng Yong, the secretary-general of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean).
"Financing has not been easy because there has been so much resistance to using rail as a means of communication," Ong told reporters in Manila after a meeting of the Asean Mekong Basin Development Cooperation group.
The rail system is slated for completion by 2015, when Asean will convert itself into an EU-style economic community. The region also hopes to have a free trade agreement with China fully in place by 2010.
The entire system, which builds on existing rail links within nations, is likely to cost $10 billion. China has said it will invest about $6.4 billion in the project by 2010. The railway will link Kunming, the capital of the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, to Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and then Singapore.
Separate lines will link Laos to Vietnam, and Myanmar to China. The 5,000-km (3,000-mile) Singapore-Kunming link was originally proposed in 1995 but has been slow to get off the ground.
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