Rails arriving for Bolivia's Cochabamba railway

Work is progressing on Bolivia's US$447mn Cochabamba railway project, part of President Evo Morales' drive to upgrade the country's transport infrastructure.

The Asociación Accidental Tunari (AAT) consortium, made up of Spain's JOCA and Molinari Rail of Switzerland, is bringing in 95km rails by truck from the Chilean port of Arica for the 42km project, AAT general manager Domingo García said. The project is 10% complete, he added.

The first 24 trucks carrying what will be a total of 5,200t of steel were scheduled to arrive in Cochabamba this week, with the full amount due within a month, García told local newspaper Los Tiempos. The company has brought in experts from Spain's Grupo Icadi to start laying the track in October, an eight-month task, García said.

The rails, which include several kilometers of track for maintenance purposes, were manufactured by China's Handan Iron & Steel Group, while the trains are being built in Belarus, according to García.

The line will link half-a-dozen municipalities in Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city. Cochabamba is home to some of the country's main natural gas fields and is also a manufacturing base and key farming region.

A dozen trains will haul five carriages with capacity for 200 passengers each, according to the Cochabamba regional government website. The three-year project secured financing last year from investment bank Credit Suisse and German state development bank KfW.

Morales met with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping over the past week to seek investment commitments for projects such as the US$20bn bi-oceanic and US$750mn Santa Cruz railways.

While Morales has pledged US$48.6bn in infrastructure and energy investments over the next five years, his government is struggling to line up financing as economic growth slowed. The government, which allocates about US$2.5bn/y to infrastructure projects, will assign US$6.200bn to public spending in 2018, according to the finance ministry.

In other infrastructure-related news, state cement company Ecebol is on track to start production at its US$244mn Oruro plant in the first half of 2019, CEO José Luis Jiménez said. The plant, which is being built by German firm Polysius and Sacyr and Imasa of Spain, is 93%-complete, Jiménez told state news agency ABI.