THE CEO of Italian State Railway (FS), Mr Mauro Moretti, officially launched construction of a 39km section of the Milan - Verona high-speed line between Treviglio and Brescia.

THE HEMU-430X prototype high-speed train was officially unveiled on May 16 in Changwon in the presence of the presidents of Korail, Korea Railroad Research Institute (KRRI) and Hyundai-Rotem.

A GROUNDBREAKING ceremony was held near Dornstadt in the German state of Baden-Württemberg on Monday to mark the start of construction on the 59.6km Wendlingen – Ulm high-speed line.

NTV, the world's first open-access high-speed train operator, carried its first passengers on April 28 with the launch of Italo services between Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples.

The Ministry of Transport has appointed Japan Railway Technical Service (Jarts) and Yachiyo Engineering to conduct a pre-feasibility study for a public-private partnership scheme to build a 144km 210km/h line between Jakarta and Bandung.

Trains using the existing 1067mm-gauge line take around 3 hours to complete the 173km trip.

THE CEO of the Australasian Railway Association, Mr Bryan Nye, wants the Australian government to consider high-speed rail as part of the solution to solving congestion at Sydney airport. Nye says plans for a second Sydney airport make it clear that airport capacity constraints must be addressed.

The Sydney - Melbourne air route transports 7.9 million passengers a year, while another 1.1 million people fly annually between Sydney and Canberra.

"A 350km/h Sydney - Melbourne high-speed rail link with a 2h 50min travel time would see 60% of air travellers change to rail," says Nye. "This shift to rail would free up the desperately-needed air paths and runway slots at Sydney airport."

Vossloh Cogifer has developed maintenance-friendly switch machines for use on standard sleepers or in box sleepers, thereby allowing automatic tamping of the trackbed. Their latest application is on two very different railways: a heavy-haul line in northern Sweden and on the recently-completed Ankara - Konya high-speed line in Turkey.

MTR Corporation has awarded CSR a Yuan 1.36bn ($US 215.7m) contract to supply nine high-speed trains for the Guangzhou - Shenzhen - Hong Kong Express Rail Link (ERL).

THE French Ministry of Transport has approved the route for two new high-speed lines totalling 417km that will serve the southwest of the country. The lines will extend the Sud-Europ Atlantique high-speed line, currently under construction between Tours and Bordeaux, southeast to Toulouse and south to Hendaye on the Spanish border.