A Luxury train service from Beijing to Tibet is being launched in September next year.

Tickets for the Tangula luxury train project will go on sale in February and trial operations will start after May, said Josh Brookhart, co-founder of TZG Partners, a Shanghai-based investment company.

The journey to the Tibetan capital Lhasa will take five days and cost each passenger about US$5,000, according to Brookhart.

There will be three trains, which will run three services every eight days to Tibet when regular operations begin.

"Our target customers are foreigners who fly to China on business trips and the new-rich in China," said Brookhart, who is optimistic about the market for the luxury train service.

Passengers can stop to sightsee at tourist sites such as Shaanxi's provincial capital Xi'an, Qinghai Lake and the Tangula Mountain Pass along the 4,000-kilometer rail route.

Each train will have seats for 96 passengers in 12 passenger cars, two dining cars and a sight-seeing car. Each passenger car has four 10-square-meter suite-like rooms featuring a double bed, a living room and bathing facilities.

The cars are being built by Bombardier Sifang Power (Qingdao) Transportation Limited in eastern Shandong Province.

The project, approved by the Ministry of Railways last month, will be operated by a joint venture between Rail Partners, a subsidiary of TZG Partners, and Qinghai-Tibet Railway Company. It attracted an investment of US$52.9 million from Hong Kong's Wing On Travel (Holdings) Limited.

"All sewage and garbage on the trains will be collected and properly disposed of, thus they will not damage the environment of the snow-covered plateau," said Ben Tsen, managing director of TZG Partners.

Tsen said the trains would adopt the most advanced environmental protection technologies to reduce the effects on the environment as much as possible.

The first train service to Tibet, the Qinghai-Tibet railway from Xi'ning, Qinghai's provincial capital, to Lhasa, began in July 2006.

Tsen said the company also planned to launch luxury trains from Beijing to scenic Dali and Lijiang in southwestern Yunnan Province.

(Shanghai Daily December 18, 2007)