By Todd DePastino
Vietnam announced plans to build a $67 billion high-speed railway from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Ground will break in 2027, and the first trains will run in 2035. The route will stretch almost 1,000 miles, north to south, and promises to more tightly connect the two ancient “rice baskets” of Vietnam: the Red River Delta in the North and the Mekong Delta in the South.
That connection has always been tenuous due to Vietnam’s strange geography and difficult terrain. The forbidding Annam mountains in the west drop off to a narrow plain in the east, which is itself bounded by the South China Sea. That means Vietnam is long and thin, only 30 miles wide in the middle. It’s also mostly mountains and marsh. Only 20% of Vietnam is flat land.
That makes a trans-Vietnamese high-speed railway expensive to build. A full 60% of the route will run over bridges. Another 10% will run through tunnels.
Vietnam already has a railway running the length of the country, and it serves as a symbol of the nation’s fragile unity, as well as the backbone of the domestic economy.
The current railroad was originally built by the French beginning in 1889. Thirty-seven years later, in the Vietnamese version of the Golden Spike ceremony at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, Emperor Bao Dai, along with French Governor General Rene Robin, secured the final piece of rail of what the French called the Trans-Indochinese Railway.
The French launched the railway in order to unify its fractious colony, expand its military control, and better exploit Vietnam’s resources for export: tea, rice, coffee, pepper, coal, zinc, tin, and, later, rubber.
With that last spike planted at Hao Son station on September 2, 1936, passengers could for the first time travel from Hanoi to Saigon by rail. The 1,000-mile trip took 42 hours on a single narrow-gauge track—the one still in use today—but it represented France’s largest investment in its Indochinese colony. That final link was the pinnacle of what France called its “civilizing mission” in Vietnam, and the colonial administrators celebrated the Trans-Indochinese Railway as a long-term investment in their colony’s future.
The impact was profound. Economically, it transformed the country, enabling the rapid transportation of goods and contributing to a dramatic rise in rice exports. Previously isolated regions gained access to national and international markets, while urban centers like Hanoi and Saigon grew into economic powerhouses.
All this was good for France.
But, at the same time, those new unifying ribbons of steel running the length of Vietnam was also good for the anti-colonial independence movement, which would eventually be led by Ho Chi Minh.
For Ho and others like him, the major impediment to a national liberation movement was the lack of a strong national identity. The country’s far-flung and loosely connected regions meant that residents of the provinces favored local loyalties over an imagined national one. The Vietnamese didn’t always think of themselves as Vietnamese, but as residents of particular villages or clusters of hamlets. They had not yet been imbued with a strong national identity.
Over time, the Trans-Indochinese Railways helped solve that problem by bringing previously isolated locations into contact with one another. By tying together a fractured colony, the French helped build the national identity Ho Chi Minh would use to evict the French.
Two destructive anti-colonial and civil wars from 1946-1975 wrecked much of the railway. But with the Fall of Saigon, the new Communist nation made rehabilitating the national line a priority. In 1976, the Hanoi government renamed the railway the Reunification Express, symbolizing the country’s unity.
Vietnam, however, remains badly divided, especially between the cosmopolitan and trade-oriented South and the more traditional and Communist North.
The nation’s terrible transportation infrastructure doesn’t help. Once you get out of the major cities, roads are mostly unpaved. The better secondary routes are cracked, pitted, bumpy, and crumbling.
The new high-speed rail line will have trains that reach over 200-miles-and-hour, and will cut the travel time between Hanoi and Saigon from 30 hours to five.
The Associated Press reported that the high-speed railway line will pass through 20 provinces and cities, with 23 passenger stations and five cargo stations.
I look forward to traveling these new rails a future VBC trip to Vietnam. And I’ll also be curious to see the changes—anticipated and otherwise—it brings to this unique country.
