Rail Project In Need of More Funds

The rehabilitation of Cambodia’s dilapidated railway network is nearly six months behind schedule, and with more than a year’s worth of work to do, the project is running out of money, a consultant for the Ministry of Public Works and Transport said yesterday. Paul Power, a consultant on the railway project hired by the ministry, said yesterday that the 600-km rehabilitation project…would likely cost between $50 million and $100 million to finish, on top of the $140 million already sunk into the project by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Australian Agency for International Development. “We are collectively working to see just how much it will cost and where it will come from,” he said, adding that the government and the project’s backers had underestimated how much of the original tracks could be salvaged. …