In November 2024, Vietnam's National Assembly approved the most ambitious infrastructure project in the country's history — a 1,541 km high-speed railway from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. If built as planned, it will cut the journey from a gruelling 30-plus hours to under six.
For most of Vietnam's modern history, travelling the length of the country by train has meant the Reunification Express — a single-track line laid partly by French colonial engineers in the 1890s, running 1,726 kilometres from Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City in the south. The fastest trains complete the journey in about 30 to 35 hours. It is a scenic route through mountains, rice paddies, and coastline — and it is also, by modern standards, impossibly slow for a country with the economic ambition Vietnam now carries.
On 30 November 2024, Vietnam's National Assembly voted to change that. By a margin of 443 votes to 4, it approved the North-South High-Speed Railway — 1,541 kilometres of new track connecting the capital Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, the country's commercial heart, at speeds of up to 350 kilometres per hour. The estimated cost: approximately $67 billion, the largest single infrastructure commitment in Vietnamese history.
A country at a turning point
Vietnam's economy has grown rapidly over the past three decades, driven by manufacturing exports and a young, urbanising population. The country has built expressways, airports, and urban metro systems (Hanoi's first metro line opened in 2021; Ho Chi Minh City's Line 1 opened in late 2024). But the national railway — the backbone of long-distance travel — has remained largely unchanged from its colonial-era alignment, sharing track with slow freight and stopping at dozens of intermediate towns.
The new HSR is designed to break that constraint entirely. At 350 km/h, the 1,541 km journey would take approximately five hours and fifteen minutes, end to end, with fewer stops. With all 23 planned stations, the journey time rises to around six hours — still an extraordinary compression compared with today's 30-plus hours. Crucially, the route will also carry freight at lower speeds, keeping the existing slow network for regional and local services.
The engineering challenge
Vietnam's terrain is not forgiving. The country is narrow — rarely more than 200 kilometres wide — but its backbone of mountains and river deltas means the railway cannot simply follow the coast. The Central Highlands section, where peaks rise above 2,000 metres, will require significant tunnelling. Engineers estimate that tunnels and bridges will account for more than 40 percent of the total route length.
The National Assembly resolution sets a target construction start of 2027 and a phased opening: northern sections near Hanoi and southern sections near Ho Chi Minh City first, with the full line completed by approximately 2035. That timetable is ambitious — comparable projects in China took ten to twelve years for individual sections. Vietnam has contracted preliminary design and feasibility studies to Japanese and Korean consulting firms, and discussions about rolling stock and civil construction contracts are ongoing.
Why this matters beyond Vietnam
Southeast Asia has watched Vietnam's decision carefully. Indonesia opened its Jakarta-Bandung high-speed link (the Whoosh) in October 2023 — the first HSR in the region — but at 143 kilometres it is more of a regional connector than a national spine. Vietnam's project is a different order of magnitude: a single line that would transform how an entire nation moves.
For India, the parallels are direct. India's own flagship high-speed railway — the Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor, roughly 508 kilometres — has been under construction since 2017 and is now expected to open in phases from 2026 onward. Vietnam's line would be three times longer. Both projects are funded partly through concessional loans and face the common challenge of tunnelling through complex urban and mountain geology.
The deeper question, for both countries, is the same: can a new high-speed railway reshape economic geography in the way that China's 50,000-kilometre HSR network has — distributing growth along the corridor, pulling investment toward second-tier cities, and gradually making the overnight train a relic of a slower era?
Vietnam's answer, at least on paper, is yes. The National Assembly vote was a declaration of intent. The 1,541 kilometres between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City now have an appointment with the future — though whether trains are running by 2035 will depend on engineering, financing, and political will that not even the most optimistic feasibility study can guarantee.