
Malaysia urges Thailand to revive Pan-Asia rail links instead of chasing land bridge dream
Last Updated on May 25, 2024 5:44 pm
The last train rolled across a steel bridge spanning the banks of the Golok River between Malaysia and Thailand 18 years ago. Now, the approaches at either end are sealed – rust and floodwaters have gnawed away at the rails alongside the decaying wooden sleepers.
In Kelantan on the Malaysian side, speaking near the derelict, graffiti-plastered Rantau Panjang station, the country’s Transport Minister Anthony Loke urges support for his vision of rail renewal, and cargo and people moving at high speeds from China to Singapore.
The aim is to upgrade Rantau Panjang into a key connection point along a Pan-Asian rail network, a once-distant dream that appears closer than ever to becoming a reality.
“If we reconnect the rail network … we will tap into Thailand’s entire network and from there all the way to Laos and China,” Loke told This Week in Asia. “We can eventually have a Pan-Asian railway.”
Built over a century ago in 1921, the ‘Friendship Bridge’ between Rantau Panjang in Malaysia and the town of Su-ngai Kolok in Thailand, is just 65 metres (213 feet) long.
But the gap also represents competing visions for the connectivity of the Mekong and the Malay Peninsula.
On Malaysia’s side, the plan is to construct the East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) from the shipping hub of Port Klang on the west coast to the eastern states of Kelantan, Terengganu and Pahang, replacing an obsolete colonial-era line with the latest rail infrastructure built by Chinese companies.
The last train rolled across a steel bridge spanning the banks of the Golok River between Malaysia and Thailand 18 years ago. Now, the approaches at either end are sealed – rust and floodwaters have gnawed away at the rails alongside the decaying wooden sleepers.
In Kelantan on the Malaysian side, speaking near the derelict, graffiti-plastered Rantau Panjang station, the country’s Transport Minister Anthony Loke urges support for his vision of rail renewal, and cargo and people moving at high speeds from China to Singapore.
The aim is to upgrade Rantau Panjang into a key connection point along a Pan-Asian rail network, a once-distant dream that appears closer than ever to becoming a reality.
“If we reconnect the rail network … we will tap into Thailand’s entire network and from there all the way to Laos and China,” Loke told This Week in Asia. “We can eventually have a Pan-Asian railway.”
Built over a century ago in 1921, the ‘Friendship Bridge’ between Rantau Panjang in Malaysia and the town of Su-ngai Kolok in Thailand, is just 65 metres (213 feet) long.
But the gap also represents competing visions for the connectivity of the Mekong and the Malay Peninsula.
On Malaysia’s side, the plan is to construct the East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) from the shipping hub of Port Klang on the west coast to the eastern states of Kelantan, Terengganu and Pahang, replacing an obsolete colonial-era line with the latest rail infrastructure built by Chinese companies.
It would be the penultimate step towards a Kunming-Singapore railway, crossing Laos, Thailand and Malaysia at speeds of up to 160km/h, and a chance to seamlessly bind the regional economies of hundreds of millions of people along the network.
A line already cuts through Laos and – after years of arm-wrestling over price and rail type – Thailand is laying tracks running south to Bangkok.
But the neck of the country leading to Malaysia is the missing piece southwards.
For now, Thailand – which is central to a Pan-Asian rail route through its territory with borders straddling Laos and Malaysia – has other priorities.
Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin is hard-selling the idea of a landbridge joining the Gulf of Thailand with the Andaman Sea via a 90km overland corridor, a short cut for cargo transport instead of sailing around the Strait of Malacca.
His proposal – if realised – potentially poses a major economic threat to Malaysia and Singapore, whose ports are situated along one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
Centuries-old pipe dream
Over 84,000 vessels sail through the narrow Strait of Malacca, which rounds Malaysia and Singapore and is the shortest sea route between East Asia’s major economies of China, Japan and South Korea, and India and beyond
The route carries around 30 per cent of the world’s trade.
By the end of the decade, this number is projected to rise to 50 per cent, with shipping expected to exceed handling capacity as China knits more tightly into Southeast Asia’s economies.
Thailand’s landbridge, with deep seaports at Ranong on the Andaman to the west and Chumphon on the Gulf in the east, could ease the bottleneck around the Malay Peninsula with an overland road and rail link. It will turbocharge Srettha’s ambition of making Thailand the premier logistics hub in Southeast Asia.
But first, Srettha must raise the foreign funds for the US$28 billion project. Then it will take the best part of a decade if there are no delays that often hamper major infrastructure developments.
“Constructing a megaproject that links the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea to the world is important to lessen congestion [on the Strait of Malacca],” Srettha said in January during a visit to Ranong.
“It will also bring development to the country as it can influence more foreign investors.”
The landbridge could take a chunk from the Port of Singapore and Malaysia’s Port Klang, the world’s second and fourteenth busiest cargo ports, respectively, and channel more intra-Asia cargo flow via Thailand.
The mammoth task of linking the Andaman and the Gulf has thwarted big dreamers over the centuries.
As early as 1677, King Narai of the Ayutthaya Kingdom in present-day Thailand looked at the map of Southeast Asia and plotted to cut a canal through the Malay Peninsula, allowing ships to circumvent the long travel south across the Strait of Malacca.