Rio de Janeiro, July 15 (IANS/EFE) Brazil will soon start a bullet train and companies from Japan, South Korea, China, France, Austria, Spain and Germany have expressed interest to build and operate it for 40 years.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva launched the bidding for the construction of the high-speed rail service between the country’s two biggest cities – Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro – a project expected to cost 33 billion reais ($18.75 billion).
The rights for construction, operation and maintenance of the rail line for 40 years will be granted to the firm that commits itself to charging the lowest fare for the service, the president said.
The trains will run at speeds of up to 350 kph along the 510.8-km route. The trip between the two cities would take 97 minutes. Nine stations are to be built on the line, including stops at the Rio and Sao Paulo international airports.
The corridor for the proposed train is home to some 40 million people – 20 percent of the Brazilian population – and to firms and industries that generate a third of the country’s gross domestic product.
Lula said though nobody believed in the project at first it will offer the same quality transportation as is available in developed countries.
‘In the beginning, nobody would be interested, nobody would present a proposal. I had to talk to Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and French President Nicolas Sarkozy to show that it was something serious,’ Lula said.
Brazil’s National Agency for Terrestrial Transport has already said the charge cannot be more than 28 cents per km, a limit meant to ensure that the train is competitive with existing passenger air service between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
The winner of the contract will have access to public loans in Brazil up to a maximum of 19.9 billion reais ($11.3 billion), 60.3 percent of the scheduled cost of the project.
The work will get under way in late 2011 and is scheduled to conclude in 2015, before the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio.
