Inauguration of railway track linking Thailand and Laos

Thai Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn has opened a rail link over the Mekong river, linking Thailand and Laos, which makes a start for the first international link for Laos.

Two passenger trains will run the 30-minute return trip each day, serving about 500 people daily. The UN-backed Trans-Asian Railway now has nearly 74,700km of working track serving 29 countries, and estimates for completion range from 10 to 15 years.

The new railway line would greatly reduce export costs, as transport by lorry was only previously available. The ultimate aim was to “unlock” and transform a country with no direct access to the sea, Lao Railway Authority spokesman Sompong Pholsena told the Lao News Agency.

The track over the Friendship Bridge, with road links extending from Singapore to China’s port city of Shanghai took, 20 months to complete and was funded by Thailand at a cost of about 197m baht ($5.5m; £3.8m).

The new network is part of a plan conceived in the 1960s to connect Asia with a continuous railway, stretching west to Turkey and Russia, and north and east to China, Vietnam and South Korea. Decades of regional conflict and poverty have delayed the plan until recent years.

CKA plans to build a movie town in Chiang Mai

CKA Chiang Mai Company Limited is located in Thailand’s northern province of Chiang Mai and is a subsidiary of the Los Angles-based entertainment firm Creative Kingdom Inc. The company has planned to invest 8.0 billion baht (220 million U.S. dollars) to build a movie town in Chiang Mai, “Chiangmaiwood”, and hopes that it would be able to surpass Hong Kong as the Asian hub of the movie industry.

The construction of this movie town on a 12-acre site in San Kamphaeng district will take an estimated seven years and by 2014 six studios of varying sizes would be available for different scales of movie productions, as quoted by Eduardo Robles, CEO of the company.

The project would officially be announced on June 19 this year, while movie producers and directors across the globe would be invited to see the business potential.

Chiang Mai has been chosen because of its good location and traffic, and also because the production costs are about 20 percent lower than those in rival locations, while the company has also received tax incentives from Thailand’s Board of Investment.