Southeast Asia Railways Report (2024)

The Future Southeast Asia Newsletter features transport and urban development news in Southeast Asia, edited by James Clark.

This is the annual Future Southeast Asia subscriber report for railways in Southeast Asia. I keep track of every railway project that is planned and under construction in Southeast Asia, and this report is a summary of all of the projects in every country.

Note that this doesn't include urban rail transit, which will be in a separate annual report. I have different annual reports staggered over the year, so this is annual from my last report, not a calendar year report.

🇧🇳 Brunei

This report is listed in country order, so we begin with Brunei. It's not often that Brunei gets a mention about railways, but Brunei is leading this report with the most outrageous railway proposal of the last year.

In March 2024 a Brunei company announced a Trans-Borneo high-speed railway that will connect Brunei, Sarawak and Sabah in Malaysia, and Kalimantan in Indonesia.

The 1,620 km railway would be longer than the proposed Vietnam high-speed railway (see Vietnam section). Like Vietnam, the Brunei HSR is proposed to travel at over 300 km/h, though the island of Borneo has a population of about 24 million compared to 100 million in Vietnam.

After the announcement was made, the Brunei government said there had been no discussions at the government level, and Sabah, Sarawak and Indonesia said they didn't know about it.

The railway website soon went offline (I regret not caching it in the Web Archive), so the story might have ended there. The idea though has persisted, and now Malaysia is saying that a feasibility study will begin in November 2024.

This is not the first time that some form of Trans-Borneo railway has been proposed. Some plans date back to 2000, and you can view all the proposals on the Trans-Borneo railway page.

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