The country’s main railway line linking Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (1,726 km) crosses the Hai Van pass by means of eight tunnels. Some of these tunnels were built before 1935 and required urgent renovation work, without interrupting rail traffic.

The pilot line is the first metro line to be built in Vietnam. It will eventually be connected to the five others metro lines by 2030, forming the backbone of the Hanoi transport network.

Kaohsiung is the second largest city in Taiwan. It is situated on the south of the island and has a network of 64 buses, but as yet, there is no urban rail infrastructure.

Delhi, the capital of India and the country’s third largest city, has 13 million inhabitants. Public transport relied almost entirely on buses until 1995, when the city decided to equip itself with a metro with a total length of 198.5 km.

Manilla, the capital and main port of the Phillipines, has 13.4 million inhabitants. Construction of the MRT network began in the 1980s.

The Korea Train express (KTX) links the South Korean capital, Seoul, to the city of Busan on the south-east coast of the peninsula. The project for its construction was awarded to a consortium of French companies with a proven track record in the field of high-speed and Korean partners from the rail industry.

The population of Shenzen, at the gateway to Hong Kong, has grown from a few million to seven million over 20 years. The city is equipping itself with a metro network which will cover 240 km on eight lines when finished. The first two lines were launched in 2004.

Currently, the capital of Taiwan has six metro lines. The second phase of the network is under construction and, when finished, will consist of seven new lines and 57 stations.

The Taiwan high-speed line covers a distance of 345 km along the west coast of the island and is designed to link the largest cities in the country : Taipei in the north and Kaohsiung in the south, where three quarters of the population live.