Railway, road projects to get additional $8.79b

An additional 50 billion yuan ($7.33 billion) will be spent on railway projects and 10 billion yuan ($1.46 billion) on transport infrastructure in the fourth quarter of this year.

The additional amount will take this year's railway expenditure to 350 billion yuan ($51.3 billion), a Ministry of Railways press release said yesterday.

The government is expected to approve projects to build 10,000 km of railways in 2009 and 2010, with expenditure of about 1 trillion yuan ($146.6 billion) in each of the two years.