China Railway Company is planning to build a high-speed rail link that will carry both passengers and cargo between China and Iran.

According to China Daily, the proposal from the state-owned company was put forward at a meeting of China Civil Engineering Society last week. It would take advantage of the easing global sanctions against Iran, while also strengthening Iran's place in China's growing economic orbit.

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Under President Xi Jinping, China's economic influence has expanded rapidly. The government is currently working on a plan to create a network that connects economies as far apart as Western Europe and Southeast Asia. The aim of this network is to increase cross-border trade.

The proposed China-Iran railway route would begin in the capital of western Xinjiang province, Urumqi, and end in Tehran, the Iranian capital - some 2,000 miles apart. The route would stop along Kyrgyzstan, Kazakstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, Quartz reported.

Already Central Asia has rail infrastructure capable of moving goods between the region and China. A major problem, however, is that Central Asian countries use a different width of track than China and most of the rest of the world. This means that there are delays during the transportation of goods as trains wait for days to change their gauges on certain crossings.

China plans to construct a single rail line based on a uniform gauge along the whole route. This would cut down the time needed to move goods and raise the route's demand against ocean freight alternatives. While passenger trains can reach a speed limit of 300 km/h on the proposed rail route, the speed limit for freight trains is 120 km/h.

According to Gulf News, China is not the only country making grand plans for Iran's soon-to-be liberated economy. Boeing has highlighted its interest to open an office in Tehran once sanctions are lifted. An unnamed company from German is reported to have already sealed a deal to create solar power stations in Iran, according to Bloomberg. For many years, several countries have been looking to get in on Iran's oil market. It is therefore conceivable that China's proposed rail link could also be put to use exporting Iranian oil, Bloomberg reported.

An analyst told China Daily that the rail route project to Tehran could suffer from incompletion due to geopolitics out of China's control. While projects in other nations are nice-to-have, routes that connect directly to China, such as the Iran' proposed line, are generally seen as key strategic goals for Beijing. That is partly because the other side of China's great rail plans involve expanding the network through Southeast Asia, to countries as far as Thailand, Laos and Malaysia.

TagsChina Railway Company, High-speed rail link, China Civil Engineering Society, China president, Central Asia, China-Iran Railway Line, Uruqmi-Tehran Railway Route