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Over 6.5 million travelled by Tibet railway in 2011

PTI

5 million people travelled on the world’s highest rail route, the Qinghai-Tibet railway, in 2011, up 9 per cent from 2010, the railway company said Tuesday.

The high-elevation railway that connects Xining, capital of Qinghai Province, to Tibet’s provincial capital of Lhasa, also transported 40 million tonnes of cargo in 2011, up 8 per cent year-on-year, an official with the Xining-based Qinghai-Tibet Railway Company said.

The number of passengers is likely to reach 6.9 million this year, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Tibet Autonomous Region in southwestern China has seen tourism boom since the railway began operations in July 2006.

A total of 8.43 million tourists, mostly Chinese, visited Tibet in the first 11 months of 2011, a 27.7 per cent increase from the same period the previous year, according to Tibet’s tourism bureau.

Copyright © 2012 Press Trust International

Published in MSN News