China's railway investment soared 37.5 percent from January to July. The numbers are attributed to a building boom of high-speed lines and the country's desire to link together poor regions.

The investment reached 133.78 billion yuan (19.6 billion U.S. dollars), the Ministry of Railways (MOR) said on Monday.

More people than ever are using railways. In the first 7 months of the year trains carried 855.3 million passengers, up 12.6 percent from the same period last year. Cargo volume was 1.94 billion tons, up 6.8 percent from a 2007.

The MOR had planned to invest 1.25 trillion yuan (182.6 billion U.S. dollars) in railway building and renovation through 2010 extending the train network by 17,000 kilometers.

China started construction on the 1,318-km-long Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway on April 18. The train is designed to run 350km per hour. The total project cost 220.9 billion yuan (32.3 billion U.S. dollars).

Source: Xinhua