Operating smoothly for 100 days as of Monday, the world's highest railway running between Qinghai and Tibet, has carried almost 300,000 passengers and 300,000 tons of cargo to and from Tibet.

From July 1 when the railway started operations to October 8 the line carried 65,000 passengers into Tibet and 212,000 out of the region, said Zhao Liwei, a publicity executive with the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Company. The cargo service, which opened earlier on March 1, had transported 280,000 tons of goods into Tibet and 12,000 tons out of the region.

The Qinghai-Tibet Railway which runs from Xining, capital of northwest China's Qinghai Province and ends in Lhasa, capital of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, is the first railway to Tibet. Before this travelers accessed Tibet by air or road only. 

Some 550 km of the 1,956 km long history-making railway are built on frozen earth.

Currently four pairs of passenger trains are traveling on the line linking Lhasa to other Chinese cities including Beijing, Xining, Lanzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

(China.org.cn, Xinhua News Agency October 10, 2006)