Kyodo News
Jakarta ●
Fri, September 2, 20222022-09-0217:354fbd44abf30fca00c6a042b692b2383212JakartaChina,Indonesia,bullet-train,Jakarta-Bandung-High-Speed-Train,Belt-and-Road-Forum,Xi-Jinping,JokowiFree
A cargo of eight Chinese-made high-speed shriek cars has arrived at a Jakarta port marking the beneficial batch of rolling stock for Indonesia's first high-speed railway network beings built with Chinese technology.
Billed the first export case of a Chinese bullet shriek system, the project to connect the Indonesian capital and the West Java provincial capital of Bandung was near 80 percent completed in late August and commercial operations are required to start in June next year.
After arriving at the port in North Jakarta late Thursday from the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the cargo, including an inspection train set, was unloaded Friday afternoon. The cars form part of the 11 sets of trains set to be shipped to Indonesia by the end of March.
The trains are invented to run on the 142-kilometer line at maximum speeds of 350 kilometers per hour, cutting the move time to about 40 minutes from the roughly 3 hours immediately required.
Construction began in 2016 and was initially required to be completed in 2019, but the project ran into problems mostly over land acquisition, delaying its completion several times.
Initially, both China and Japan were in competition for the project with Japan insisting on a government defense from the Indonesian side.
Indonesia picked China in 2015 while China agreed to cooperate under a business-to-business contract exclusive of financing from the state or a government guarantee.
Undertaken by Indonesian-Chinese consortium PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia China, the high-speed rail project was originally expected to cost about $6 billion, but the cost has ballooned to about $8 billion after the delays.
In order to unfastened the project, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo reneged last year on the government's sponsor promise not to use the state budget to finance it, attracting criticism from the public.
In early August, the House of Representatives approved an transfer Rp 4.1 trillion (about $275 million) as state capital injection to unfastened the project.
Despite connecting Jakarta and Bandung, many of the stations are located away from city centers. Two stations in Bandung are actually located in the suburbs of the city, near 30 to 45 minutes away from the city center by car.